Here is a bad player. In addition to not recognizing his defeat in the presidential election against Joe Biden – a position that still persists today – Donald Trump would have taken care to take with him, when leaving the White House, about fifteen boxes from the White House to store them at his residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. This was revealed by the washington post, Monday. The administration organized the repatriation of these documents in mid-January.
The matter is serious and goes beyond the simple bitterness linked to the defeat of the billionaire: at the end of his mandate, any American president must transmit all of his e-mails, letters and other working documents to the Archives. national authorities, responsible for keeping them.
“The only way for a president to be truly held accountable in the long run is to keep a record of who said what, who did what, what policies were encouraged or adopted, and that’s such an important part of the scope of long-term responsibility – beyond just elections and campaigns,” said presidential historian Lindsay Chervinsky, quoted by the daily.
What did Donald Trump jealously want to keep? Difficult, for the moment, to be exhaustive. According to washington post, some visibly important documents were there, like his fiery correspondence with the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un. But also a letter left by his predecessor Barack Obama, as well as some gifts offered by foreign leaders.
A question also arises: has Donald Trump hidden other documents? According to the Archives, “representatives of the former president continue to search for presidential records.” Last week, this same institution had already revealed that the former president had a habit of tearing up some of his working documents, another practice contrary to a 1978 law. “officials responsible for the management of White House records”, others left as is.
“Lock Her Up”
These troubles remain modest for the billionaire, compared to those incurred as part of the investigation into the assault on the Capitol by his supporters on January 6. Moreover, the Supreme Court of the United States had already rejected, at the end of January, Donald Trump’s request to maintain the confidentiality of his archives linked to his actions on that specific day. Trump responded with further populist invective, suggesting he could pardon Capitol assailants if re-elected president, 70 people have already been convicted to date.
But this new example proves how useful the archives can be in the case of such a rowdy presidency – it’s an understatement – like that of Donald Trump, for which historians had already warned, in December 2020possible voluntary leaks of sensitive data.
This discovery finally weighs a little more on the credibility of the candidate. Because it also echoes another case, that of the emails from Hillary Clinton, who had poisoned the campaign for the Democrat’s White House in 2016. “Lock her up!”, chanted his opponent sharply. Donald Trump. As a reminder, Hillary Clinton had made the mistake of using another e-mail address to record her conversations as Secretary of State (equivalent to Foreign Affairs in France). A serious breach of the law, and in part of that concerning the archiving of exchanges carried out here and there, potentially confidential.
In Donald Trump’s defense, however, he is not the only one to have violated the Presidential Records Act. “All recent administrations have committed violations of this rule, most often due to the use of unofficial email and telephone accounts”, underlines the washington post. The Clintons had also vanished from the White House with furniture declared as “personal gifts”. But the Trump period will undoubtedly have been the most delicate in this matter, assure the Archives, at least since the Nixon period (1969-1974), another former Republican president, who fell after a scandal, the Watergate… from from which was born the Presidential Records Act.