President Donald Trump does not have to turn over all his presidential records to the government after leaving office, the Department of Justice has concluded, after finding a landmark transparency law to be unconstitutional.
“Congress does not have the power to compel an entire branch of government to create and save every single possible piece of paper,” a White House official told Axios.
The stance could set up a major documents fight when Trump leaves office, a flashback to the Mar-a-Lago files case that followed his first term.
In an opinion posted on Wednesday, the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the White House, wrote that the Presidential Records Act of 1978 “exceeds Congress’s enumerated and implied powers, and it aggrandizes the Legislative Branch at the expense of the constitutional independence and autonomy” of the president.
As a result, the memo added, the president “need not further comply” with the Watergate-era law, which requires the president to turn over official records about White House decision making to the National Archives and Records Administration.
“President Trump is committed to preserving records from his historic Administration and he will maintain a rigorous records retention program,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told The Independent.
She added that White House is not deleting emails and other electronic records, and that staff “must undertake records training so they properly preserve all materials related to: the performance of their duties for historical value, the administrative record of policy decisions and actions, and litigation needs.”
The Independent has contacted the DOJ and the National Archives for comment.
Trump was indicted in 2023 for allegedly keeping hundreds of documents, including classified materials, at his Mar-a-Lago home after leaving office.
As part of the special counsel case against the then-former president, photos emerged of piled boxes of documents being kept in a bathroom at the Florida estate.
A federal judge dismissed the case in 2024, finding that special counsel Jack Smith had been unconstitutionally appointed.
Smith dropped an appeal of the decision after Trump was elected for a second term. In February, a court dropped a related case against a pair of Trump employees who were accused of obstructing justice by attempting to move documents the FBI was seeking.
Democratic lawmakers claimed this year that subsequent document releases by the DOJ showed Trump may have “stolen” files linked to his business activities after leaving his first term.
The White House dismissed the allegations.
“President Trump did nothing wrong, which is why he easily defeated the Biden DOJ’s unprecedented lawfare campaign against him and then won nearly 80 million votes in a landslide election victory,” the administration told The Independent last week.
The opinion on record keeping comes at a time of instability at the DOJ. The president announced on Thursday that he was replacing Attorney General Pam Bondi.
