User:Archivethomas/National Security Archive

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[This is a rewritten section of the "lawsuits" portion of the National Security Archive current article]

An Archive Freedom of Information lawsuit compelled the Pentagon to release the 15,000 Donald Rumsfeld "snowflake" memos covering his years as Secretary of Defense (2001-2006), providing essential evidence for the George Polk Award-winning series, "The Afghanistan Papers," written by Craig Whitlock of the Washington Post. Another Archive lawsuit forced the State Department to declassify the memoranda, notes, and highest-level meeting transcripts recorded by Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott during the Clinton administration, with a particular focus on U.S.-Russian relations in the first decade after the end of the Soviet Union.

The National Security Archive also brought and won seminal lawsuits regarding the preservation of White House e-mails and other electronic records. The original White House e-mail lawsuit, beginning in January 1989 with Armstrong v. Reagan and continuing against presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton, established that e-mail had to be treated as government records, consequently leading to the preservation of more than 30 million White House e-mail messages from the 1980s and 1990s. The second White House e-mail lawsuit, filed in 2007 against the George W. Bush administration and settled by the Obama administration in 2009, achieved the recovery and preservation of more than 22 million White House e-mail messages that were deleted from White House computers between March 2003 and October 2005.

Cumulatively, the Archive's litigation over the years to preserve White House e-records -- lawsuits brought together with a wide range of scholarly and public interest partners, and with the support of multiple pro bono law firms -- has resulted in the preservation of over a billion e-mails and e-messages, ranging from the IBM PROFs messages in the Reagan White House of the 1980s, to the WhatsApp messages in the Trump White House of 2020.

During the Trump years (2017-2021), the Archive brought a series of cases challenging record-keeping practices and the lack thereof at the White House. One of President Trump's first actions on record-keeping was to suspend the routine publication of White House visitor logs kept by the Secret Service in vetting visitors and previously released online by the Obama White House some 90 days after the visit. In April 2017 the National Security Archive, with the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), filed a FOIA lawsuit (Doyle v. DHS) against the Department of Homeland Security, the parent agency of the Secret Service, to compel continued release of the logs. Ultimately, a federal judge in New York and the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the Trump Administration had effectively converted those Secret Service agency records into presidential records not subject to FOIA.

The Archive together with Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington also brought suit against the Trump administration's use of messaging applications that can automatically delete conversations or records of conversations. The suit, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington et al. v. Trump et al., was filed on June 22, 2017. In March 2017, U.S. District Court Judge Christopher R. Cooper ruled that the act gives the president a "substantial degree of discretion" in deciding what should be preserved as a permanent records and it allows the president to destroy records that no longer have "administrative, historical, informational or evidentiary value." The DC Circuit upheld the Cooper decision, although Circuit Judge David Tatel remarked in the decision that disappearing instant messages represented a technology "that Richard Nixon could only dream of."

In December 2020, the Archive together with the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, the American Historical Association, and the public interest group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) brought a new lawsuit naming the White House and the National Archives as defendants and asking federal court for a temporary restraining order against any destruction of documents during the Trump-Biden transition. Justice Department lawyers assured then-District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson that a litigation hold as a result of the lawsuit covered all White House records so that a TRO was unnecessary; and after the Biden transition, the government informed Judge Jackson and the plaintiffs that all presidential records had been secured, including the WhatsApp messages generated by senior White House staff. Subsequently, the National Archives realized that many boxes of Trump records were missing, prominently including correspondence with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, and began recovery measures that ultimately included an FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago.