A federal judge has just blocked Donald Trump's secret plans to destroy and conceal records in perpetuity And this federal judge appointed by George W Bush was not holding back When people learned that the Trump regime was circulating internally a legal memo saying that they would not abide by the Presidential Records Act, they would not preserve presidential records, declaring it unilaterally to be unconstitutional Obviously, it was passed following Richard Nixon's corruption and crimes and no one ever challenged it It was just a foregone conclusion When you're in office, you preserve your records They don't belong to you They belong to the people We obviously know Donald Trump got in a lot of trouble for taking presidential records and bringing him to Mara Lago when he shouldn't have this first time around And so the Trump regime's like, we're just not going to abide by presidential records act And so, you know, they would do things like they would speak on signal chats, encrypted apps They would apparently be having all of these text communications in the course and scope of executive functions All of this stuff in is relating to the executive branch work is supposed to be preserved and protected, but the Trump regime is viewing a we're just going to delete all of this because the Presidential Records Act doesn't exist Now, a judge is blocking this I think we're going to have to get to the next question of what has been deleted already and what ramifications will follow because this George W Bush appointed Republican judge says, "What are you talking about The presidential records act is definitely constitutional You can't just declare it invalid And one of the Trump regime tactics was that they were trying to challenge the standing of anybody who would file the lawsuit to block them from uh violating the Presidential Records Act, saying, "Well, there's really no one who's able to bring the lawsuit in the first place Therefore, we're just going to destroy all of the records." Now, this federal judge, Judge Bates, begins the order by citing 1984, George Orwell's novel 1984 And we've seen a lot of federal judges, Trump appointed judges, Bushapp appointed judges, Reagan appointed judges, and Democratic appointed judges often lead court opinions by citing 1984 Never a good sign when you see that as a common trend So, here's what let's let's just let's do what we do here on the Midas Touch Network Let's dig through this uh legal document Here's what it says Who controls the past controls the future Who controls the present controls the past Cited George Orwell, 1984 Perhaps with that lesson in mind, Congress enacted laws to ensure that government records are created, preserved, and made available to the public Among those is the Presidential Records Act, which mandates the preservation of materials related to official responsibilities of the president In so doing, the act democratizes the history of an indispensable institution, access to those records, allows future presidents to pick up where their predecessors left off, Congress to identify inefficiency and malfeasants, and the public to learn from the mistakes of the past Now, however, almost 50 years after its passage, the executive branch, Trump, asserts that the records act is unconstitutional Two sets of plaintiffs brought this suit to challenge that assertion by Trump, seeking at this stage a preliminary injunction At the threshold, the government trumps that plaintiffs lack standing because they have not been injured and they lack a cause of action because review is precluded by the statutory scheme But plaintiffs have established a substantial risk that the government is no longer fully complying with the Records Act, at least with respect to three categories of records Electronic records created on personal rather than official devices Records created by the president or vice president themselves and records the president discards We pause right there for a second You may be going, "Wait a minute Didn't Donald Trump run his entire first campaign on Hillary Clinton's emails and 35,000 emails and servers and this and that and spreading a lot of conspiracies but making that the focal point So, you're telling me here what Donald Trump is saying is that he's rampantly deleting all text messages communications because he believes there's no obligation to preserve at all and he's declaring unilaterally the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional Yep, that's exactly what I'm saying Then you have uh the judge say the risk amounts toformational injury for these plaintiffs because they have regularly sought access to presidential records under the Freedom of Information Act and plan to continue doing so And plaintiffs likely have a cause of action under the Constitution and to enjoin violations of federal law because the government, which has concluded that the Records Act is unconstitutional, is necessarily acting under its article 2 powers rather than any statutory authority in promulgating new records guidance On the merits, the Records Act is likely constitutional it was validly enacted by Congress under the property clause because Congress may prospectively designate presidential records as federal property and then regulate that property and it is also a valid exercise of the necessary and proper clause as it promotes the accountability and efficiency of executive branch operations Moreover, it does not impermissibly intrude on any presidential prerogative, especially because presidents, including Trump in his first term, have complied without complaint for almost 50 years, and the new guidance for the executive office of the president, voluntarily imposes similar burdens to those the government now decries as unbearable Because the president must take care that the laws be faithfully executed, he must carry out the duties imposed by the Records Act The Records Act follows in a tradition dating back to the founding of laws promoting integrity and public service It is not the first and will not be the last to adopt the government's position that the act is unconstitutional would disable Congress and future presidents from reflecting on experience in defiance of the very words engraved on the National Archives building in Washington What is past is prologue And while the presidency is a singularly important institution, the gravity does not free it from modest constraint Quite the opposite, each branch of government derives its authority from the trust placed in it by the people And Congress has validly determined that this act helps to maintain that trust by shining some light on the activities of the president and his aids I want to bring in Harry Litman from Talking Feds YouTube, Talking Feds Substack, and the Talking Feds podcast Now Harry, I really wanted to dig into the language there by Judge Bates, this George W Bush appointee, because this is why I love law This is why I went to law school This is what I admired I don't care that he was appointed by George W Bush, who I have a lot of disagreements would be putting it very lightly This is elegant It's logical It's wellreasoned This is the type of people I admired when I went to Georgetown Law School And I see it here still This is what's under attack and this isn't partisan This is just what the law is and he's describing it Harry, break it all down for us. >> Yeah So, first I want to say, Ben, I think this is why Judge Bates went to law school as well There's a sort of gravity and sonorous quality to the opinion as you say He starts with George Orwell and really it's it's a downthe-middle part of Trump's Orwellian effort to just erase the past and substitute his own completely false self- serving view He puts a little Shakespeare in there We have passed his prologue So he there's a sense that this is an important one And I want to say this is an important one the presidential records act and the basic principle is as you say congress said the presidential records act belong the presidential records belong to the people that's the core principle and they do it under the the property uh clause and the uh effort to just um disavow it is even sort of more formal and pernitious I think than you say because they we've we've talked about and I'm sure the mightest mighty and and fed heads know about the office of legal counsel and the White House lawyer here served up hey uh this you know young 38-year-old or whatever office of legal counsel guy we want an opinion on the presidential records act he wrote this opinion now these opinions the executive branch you're writing it for but you're supposed to say what the law is little bit awkward point here is that the Supreme Court had already ruled has already ruled 7 to2 do that it's unconstitutional and the OLC opinion just says blindly uh-uh it's wrong and uh because OLC opinions until overturned by the courts are the law of the executive branch it was just everybody you know get those shredding machines fired up because the state of play in the executive branch until Bates's ruling was that the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional and by the way When I was in DOJ, it was honored punctiliously and it was kind of a pain in the rear sometimes, but people took it extremely seriously So, you have now uh for the first time, and you're right, who knows what's happened already Um, I want to now move a little bit to what they're saying This is such a common trope of the Trump administration basically violate the law that Congress passed and passed clearly and then say nobody is standing to sue us We we know that Congress in general, a group of them can't Maybe maybe maybe a whole house can, but they he's got the control of the majority So, we're we're seeing the same thing that's going to happen in the big slush fund case And they've done it again and again, nener So, we're violating the law, but you can't get to it And here's what you're going to see in this case Judge Bates has a very solid analysis He's got the president with him and the like You're going to see him come in to the DC circuit, hope to draw two or three of their hawkish onstanding um people and have them say, you know, there there are two groups here um Ben, just to to sketch it very quickly One are people who do a lot of foya, but you know any foy if I do one foyer I'm not sure it makes a difference that if you do 15 the other are historians and they say look we use these records all the time this is how we do our history you're depriving us of that that's going to be front and center and the claim of standing that's going to go to the DC circuit and maybe even the supreme court but it's the sort of uh you know scound ground rules uh effort to say, "Yeah, maybe we broke the law, but nobody can sue us for it." And that's where you're going to see them fighting So, in that way, it's just, you know, par for the course Par for the course to ignore or just declare We we don't have to listen to law because the unitary executive don't nobody can tell the president what to do Of course, Congress can That's checks and balances and then anyone tries to sue, we'll claim uh standing and and that's the fight So, it really is a dastardly and b completely now a familiar refrain coming from the administration. >> Where do we go from here, Harry, though, as it relates to documents that may have already been destroyed I mean, you know, that I think the opinion was a proylactic, if you will, against past conduct that probably already took place I mean, it was probably announced They destroy, you know, all of these communications have likely been destroyed and purged I would venture to guess millions of pages of documents have already been destroyed probably documenting giving my opinion protected by the first amendment millions of crimes that could have been taking place with all of this shadiness happening Now, what do we do Is is there a part of this that then digs into, okay, this was the preliminary injunction part Stop doing it going forward But what happened in the past and what happens when this is declared constitutional and we know Trump affirmatively destroyed Is there ramifications? >> Yeah, look, it's a great um question and it it's really vexing because think about it two ways The courts and Congress in the courts, you know, you somebody sues even if they have standing and the administrator's going to look, this was the law at the time Nobody enjoined us We had the OLC opinion Uh we we didn't do anything wrong Just destroyed the people's uh records, but that was the law at the time And then in addition, you they'll encounter so many obstacles having to do with executive branch immunity and the like Uh so I think that's the the downside The upside is as I was saying about DOJ this is so inculcated throughout the agencies that you have to follow it and I don't think maybe the White House which matters the most but in general I don't think a sort of you know all agencies get your shredders shredding uh is going to uh have happened and hopefully the damage is slight I think they'll get away with what they've done already as far as courts go Congress now is going to be and we're finding elsewhere and it's that's why I'm really focused on this slush uh fund case because it seems to be peeling off some Republicans Congress can basically investigate, oversee, put people on the hot seat, try to identify this is part of their oversight responsibility I think it's perfectly fine of them to say, "What the hell were you even thinking you had a 7 to2 Supreme Court opinion otherwise and you relied on it We want to we want to hear more So my sense is and this is also my sense of of the slush fund You know it's it's going to be to Congress and lawsuits that we think so um reflexively that's the way to go Man oh man real uphill climb uh especially uh with immunity and this was the state of the law Bates had a chance, by the way, to do he's a law-abiding judge, just as you say, to do an earlier stay, and they didn't quite ask, right He didn't put it on So, the the state of play was, you know, that's that's what they can do until today So, I I I'm uh I'm not very sanguin about stuff that may already have been destroyed. >> Everybody, subscribe to Harry Litman's YouTube channel It's called Talking Feds Search Talking Feds Subscribe now Thanks, Harry. >> Hey, thanks, Ben Love this video Support independent media and unlock exclusive content Add free videos and custom emojis by becoming a paid member of our YouTube channel today You can also gift memberships to others Let's keep growing together.