On May 20, the Associated Press published an article titled “The future of history: Trump could leave less documentation behind than any previous U.S. president.” As a federal records management consultant with more than 25 years of experience supporting White House and agency records management at all levels of the government, I can assure you nothing in this article is even remotely true.
Let’s begin with the article’s opening claim: “For generations, official American documents have been meticulously preserved and protected … safeguarding snapshots of the government and the nation for posterity.” While this may have been true decades ago when almost all government records were maintained on paper, it has not been true in the digital age.
Both the Presidential Records Act (PRA) and the Federal Records Act (FRA) require records born digitally to be managed through each phase of their lifecycle — creation, distribution, use, maintenance, and disposition — in their native electronic formats. These records must be maintained in systems that ensure their integrity, authenticity, and provenance, and apply an archivist of the United States-approved retention schedule that prevents their premature destruction by anyone.
Over the course of my career, I have supported the management of billions of electronic government records. During that time, I have never seen a single White House or agency electronic record managed through its lifecycle in compliance with the PRA or the FRA. Not one. The government claims to be doing it, but they are not.
Though this may be hard to believe, it is demonstrably true. It is also something I am willing to swear to under oath. The Associated Press’s claim that the government has “meticulously preserved and protected” federal records in the past is simply not true.
The article also asserts that the Trump administration “sought to expand the executive branch’s power to shield from public view key administration initiatives” by utilizing apps like Signal, which can “auto-delete messages containing sensitive information rather than retaining them for record-keeping.”
However, the article fails to note that Signal’s auto-delete feature is optional and can be turned off. Moreover, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) approved Signal for government use under General Records Schedule 6.1 during the Biden administration. It is also not the president’s job to manage the lifecycle of White House electronic messages in compliance with the PRA. That work is delegated to the White House Office of Records Management (WHORM), which is part of the Executive Office of the President and operates under the Office of Administration.
The article further claims that the FBI raid on President Trump’s Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, was due to the president’s refusal to return classified records to the National Archives. But NARA had no right to claim ownership of the paper printouts of the electronic records that the president stored at his estate.
As journalist Lee Smith notes in his book, Disappearing the President:
When the President leaves the White House, WHORM gathers up all the president’s digital records and accessions them to NARA, where they are permanently preserved in compliance with the Presidential Records Act. If the original, digital records were not already preserved on National Archives servers, NARA should have questioned WHORM leadership, not raided the former president’s home.
In short, NARA’s referral of Trump’s classified documents case to the Department of Justice was a politically motivated decision by then-National Archivist David Ferriero. There was no legal justification for the referral, and the subsequent raid on Mar-a-Lago was a violation of Trump’s rights.
The AP article also claims Trump fired the “ostensibly independent” archivist of the United States, Colleen Shogan, because he was angered by her role in his document case. This is also not true.
Shogan’s predecessor, Ferriero, was brought into the Obama administration under the influence of leftist billionaire David Rubenstein, who had worked at Duke University with Ferriero while Rubenstein was chair of the Duke Board of Trustees and Ferriero was the school’s librarian and vice provost for library affairs. Rubenstein evidently believed Ferriero would be a good fit for his goal of “turn[ing] U.S. institutions into platforms to promote contemporary progressive ideas,” as Smith wrote in Tablet.
When Ferriero resigned from his position, he told the Biden administration that they had “better not hire another white male” to replace him. Once again, the Biden administration chose a Rubenstein associate: historian and part-time novelist Colleen Shogan, then the director of the David M. Rubenstein Center at the White House Historical Association.
Rubenstein knew that Shogan, though unqualified to be the national archivist, maintained politics that aligned with the Obama/Biden agenda and that she would continue the same partisan behavior as her predecessor.
President Trump should have dismissed Ferriero over his dishonest, partisan activities during his first term. He learned his lesson and was not going to make that mistake again. Shogan was not fired because of her “independence,” as the article implies. She was fired because of her disregard for it.
These are just a few examples of dishonest reporting from the Associated Press, but there are many more. As I said, nothing in the piece is true.
But the more important point is that if President Trump wants to restore the trust in our government that was so badly damaged over the last four years during the Biden administration, he must comprehensively reform NARA and the government’s entire records management ecosystem. When this is done, the media will claim his objective is to obscure his administration’s actions from the public. The American people will need to know this is the exact opposite of the truth.
Don Lueders is a Certified Records Manager with more than a quarter-century supporting federal records management at all levels of the government. He is also a documented whistleblower who has exposed the government’s failed electronic records management systems and their costly, often tragic, consequences. Follow him on X @donlueders.
