This is on the media's midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. So last month, amid the rush of news from the

Justice Department, another troubling bulletin. In a new legal opinion, the Department's Office of

Legal Counsel ruled the Presidential Records Act goes too far, saying Congress cannot force the president

to preserve and turn over records to the

National Archives. The law has been in place since the 1970s, requiring presidents to treat

official records as government property, not personal. Given the administration's proclivity

for obscuring information, the fact that it challenged to the act wasn't a shock, but presidential

records are the backbone of presidential libraries, and our president has long shown keen interest

in memorializing his time in office, and his library, according to renderings released in March,

will be extravagantly trumpificent.

It's going to be most likely a hotel, you know. This concept could be office, but it's most

likely going to be a hotel with a beautiful building underneath and a 747 Air Force One in the

lobby, which is going to be a trick.

Even before architectural renderings were released, his multi-purpose facility was already serving a purpose, presidential piggy bank. When the Qatari royal family gave Trump a Boeing

747 to become Air Force One, it wasn't a bribe, but a future exhibit in the library.

When Trump sought damages from ABC News, Paramount, Meta, and X, their settlements, about 63 million in all,

weren't Trump profiting off the office, but money for the library, which raises an inevitable question,

which I posed last year to historian Tim Niftali.

Why does the president need so much money for a library?

That's a product of our beautiful constitutional system. The Article I branch, which is Congress,

is not thrilled about building shrines to the Article 2 branch, which is the presidency or the executive

branch. The way the system works, the president would build this facility, deed it to the American people,

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