Talk:Presidential Records Act

Application and NPOV
OK, so Trump broke the law; no surprise. But I suspect using "Application" as an excuse to denounce him violates "neutral point of view." — Preceding unsigned comment added by 伟思礼 (talk • contribs) 02:20, 21 June 2019 (UTC)


 * The line "Some of the recovered documents were marked as classified, including some at the "top secret" level." speaks as if a crime was committed. The president is the ultimate & final classification authority, and as a result he can't commit a crime related to classification concerning documents that were in his possession back while he was president and are still in his possession.  Unlike Hillary Clinton, Trump was actually president, and the senate did not convict him.  He has every right to have records in his possession.  PRA doesn't negate any of that.  The PRA simply makes it a crime to not allow the National Archives to have either the original or at least a copy of all this stuff.  If anything in a former president's possession may need better securing, according to the current POTUS, it's incumbent on NARA to help the former president secure those materials, such as in secure rooms, vaults, or safes, but still this is not a crime.  Trump's camp already gave NARA access to the files you're referring to, which they had gone through. That they are now raiding his residence in a showy manner when they could have just gone back and looked through them again is rather bizarre.  We will see what the supposed charges are that justified this raid and why they think going in and now just seizing all of it makes sense months later, to say nothing of the optics of raiding a former president. 2600:2B00:7628:D700:30B5:82CB:DDFE:7A1C (talk) 09:00, 9 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Actually, the PRA doesn't make anything a crime: it's famously "toothless".  Otherwise Trump would have committed any number of acts of Felonious Flushing already.  Arguably the article should try to make this point clearer.  He has no right to have classified records in his possession post-presidency, much less to destroy them, deny access to the (actual) executive branch, etc.  He could have declassified them while still president, but you're just breezily assuming that was done in all these cases, absent any evidence that's actually what happened, and seems pretty unlikely on the face of it.  The position argued by the then-Trump-WH was that declassification had to be done in writing, minimally by amending the annotation on his own copy.  If no such declassification was notified to the responsible agency, and the retrieved documents were sharpie-free, it hardly seems arguable to maintain a position of "by keeping them he must have been declassifying them".
 * However, this all comes pretty straightforwardly back to, what do the reliable sources say? If the WaPo is being accurately summarised here, and no available source of similar quality argues for a different characterisation, we shouldn't be web-foruming a different view.  I don't follow the original comment about "Application", though -- what text is being referred to here?  109.255.211.6 (talk) 04:29, 10 August 2022 (UTC)

The Whos
Who created it and put it forward, which parties passed the Act and who was the President? 92.11.194.45 (talk) 17:56, 15 August 2022 (UTC)
 * Since the Act dates to 1978, the president was Jimmy Carter (term 1977-1981). Dimadick (talk) 04:46, 16 August 2022 (UTC)
 * I can't readily find a record of the exact congressional votes on its passage, but it certainly had at least some degree of bipartisan support, as it had 9 Democrat and 4 Republican co-sponsors. Including one D. Quayle...  109.255.211.6 (talk) 10:00, 16 August 2022 (UTC)