The Battle Over Presidential Records, from Nixon to Trump
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The New Yorker
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 14 June 2023
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In November of 2020, days after Joe Biden won the election, Jill Lepore examined how Presidential documents have historically been preserved, in a New Yorker essay titled “Will Trump Burn the Evidence?” The piece anticipated that, when Trump left the White House and archivists came to collect his papers, official materials would be missing. Now we know for a fact that Trump took documents with him. But he’s hardly the first President to stash or destroy records. Lepore, a staff writer for this magazine and a historian at Harvard, joins Tyler Foggatt to consider a question that she heard again and again during Trump’s Presidency: Is this worse than everything we’ve seen before?
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| 0:50.0 | You're listening to the political scene. |
| 0:52.4 | I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker. |
| 0:56.1 | In November of 2020, just days after Joe Biden won the presidential election, |
| 1:01.7 | Jillipur wrote an essay for the New Yorker titled, Will Trump Burn the Evidence? |
| 1:06.3 | It was about the possibility that when Trump left office, an archivist came to get his papers, |
| 1:11.7 | official documents would be missing. |
| 1:14.0 | Now we know that Trump did take records with him when he left. |
| 1:17.6 | But he's not the first president to stash or even to destroy his records. |
| 1:22.3 | Jill is a historian at Harvard, and she finds herself facing a question that she heard again and again during Trump's |
| 1:28.0 | presidency. Is this worse than anything we've seen before? So hi, Jill. Thank you so much for coming on. |
| 1:36.4 | Hey, yeah. Thanks for having me. So you once asked the question, will Trump burn the evidence? |
| 1:42.2 | And now we sort of have an answer to that. So I'm |
| 1:47.2 | wondering how the recent revelations compare to what you were expecting. I, like everyone else, |
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