Does the president own presidential records?
The NPR Politics Podcast
NPR
4.4 • 25.7K Ratings
🗓️ 20 April 2026
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This episode: senior political correspondent Tamara Keith, Supreme Court and justice correspondent Carrie Johnson, and senior political editor and correspondent Domenico Montanaro.
This podcast was produced by Casey Morell and Bria Suggs, and edited by Rachel Baye.
Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover politics. I'm Carrie Johnson. I cover the Justice Department in Supreme Court. And I'm Domenico Montanaro, senior political editor and correspondent. And today on the show, the Trump administration says a law designed to preserve presidential records is unconstitutional, and therefore |
| 0:23.4 | President Trump doesn't have to follow it. Carrie, what is this law and what does it say exactly? |
| 0:30.6 | This law is called the Presidential Records Act. President Jimmy Carter signed it all the way back |
| 0:36.1 | in 1978, and it makes clear that documents that are |
| 0:40.2 | created or received by the president or the vice president are actually materials that belong to |
| 0:45.6 | the government. The law also allows for, requires a transfer of those materials when the |
| 0:51.9 | administration ends to the National Archives. And this all came about |
| 0:55.5 | because of a whole bunch of fighting during the Richard Nixon era. Remember, Nixon fought all the way to |
| 1:03.0 | the Supreme Court in effort by special prosecutors to get the tapes that he made, the recordings he made |
| 1:08.6 | in the White House. And then after he left, after he |
| 1:11.3 | resigned, he wanted to take all his materials home to California with him. And there was a whole |
| 1:17.4 | bunch of back and forth. Ultimately, Congress passed a law that concerned Nixon's materials. |
| 1:21.8 | And then a few years later, they made this the law for all future presidents. And Tam, everybody has followed that, more or less, |
| 1:30.3 | until this month when the Trump Justice Department declared that law unconstitutional. |
| 1:35.8 | Matthew Connolly is a history professor at Columbia University. Here's what he had to say. |
| 1:40.6 | In America, I think most of us have now come to understand, you know, that the president |
| 1:45.6 | works for us, right? The papers, the records of the decisions they make on our behalf, those are |
| 1:52.3 | our papers. That's our history. Carrie, the Justice Department is saying this law is |
| 1:57.3 | unconstitutional. Why is the administration saying that they don't have to follow it, but all the other presidents did? |
| 2:05.1 | Yeah, the administration's relying on a new legal opinion from the head of the Office of Legal Counsel inside the Justice Department. |
| 2:13.0 | And that office basically advises the entire executive branch about the state of the law. And a lawyer in that |
| 2:19.2 | unit basically says this law is unconstitutional because it's Congress usurping power that |
... |
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