'In reality, the Presidential Records Act is the Presidential Damn-Near-Perpetual-Secrecy Act. Former presidents pocket multimillion-dollar advances for their memoirs while their records are mostly quarantined for decades from the citizens they often misgoverned.
The Nixon Library did not release the final batch of his secret tapes until 2013 — 39 years after Nixon was driven from office. The Lyndon B. Johnson Library delayed releasing the final batch of his secret tapes of presidential conversations until 2016 — 47 years after he left office.
President George W. Bush in 2001 issued an executive order that “effectively rewrote the Presidential Records Act, converting it from a measure guaranteeing public access to one that blocks it,” as law professor Jonathan Turley noted. Congress overturned parts of that order in 2014.
Obama White House lawyers repeatedly invoked the Presidential Records Act to “delay the release of thousands of pages of records from President Bill Clinton’s White House,” Politico reported. At the end of his presidency, Barack Obama trucked 30 million pages of his administration’s records to Chicago, promising to digitize them and eventually put them online — a move that outraged historians.
More than five years after Obama’s presidency ended, the National Archives webpage reveals that zero pages have been digitized and disclosed. People can file requests via the Freedom of Information Act (a law Obama helped wreck) to access Obama records, but responses from presidential libraries can be delayed for years, even more than a decade, if the information is classified.
Similarly, President Joe Biden double-crossed Americans on disclosing records from his 36-year Senate career. In 2011, Biden donated 1,875 boxes of documents from his Senate days to the University of Delaware, which received federal subsidies to curate the collection while it was locked up. Biden and the university library promised to unseal the records “two years after Biden retires from public office.” Biden retired as vice president in January 2017. But the library announced just before Biden launched his presidential campaign that secrecy would continue until two years after Biden “retires from public life.”
The FBI raid was also purportedly justified because Trump possessed classified documents. Classification is one of DC’s biggest con games...
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