This is the Kator Daily Podcast for Monday, September 5, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The legal issues surrounding the classified documents and presidential records

discovered at former President Trump's home

are beginning to come into clearer focus.

Cato's Patrick Eddington details some of the new information and why he believes

the federal government was so interested in recovering those classified and other documents

sooner rather than later.

You call it document gate and of course this is in reference to documents that the FBI seized at the former President Trump's

residence and that belong to, by all accounts,

belong to the US government in one fashion or another, depending on. all the various documents but they all belong to the US government.

So to the extent that the president, former president, may or may not be accused of wrongdoing

in a court of law at some point down the road, it's worth taking a moment to understand where the laws came

from that he may be accused of violating.

So the Presidential Records Act, how did that come about?

So we have two statutes with respect to federal records that we need to kind of keep in focus here.

You've mentioned the first Presidential Records Act from 1978.

But the one that preceded that was the Federal Records Act enacted in 1950, and that's

the one that covers everything essentially in the executive branch, right?

That's what gives the archivist of the United States and the National Archives

the authority to take custody of records when an agency or department deems them to no longer be of day-to-day value,

they become historical.

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