Do Americans own the president's papers? Appeals court to weigh in
The Trump administration is challenging the constitutionality of the Presidential Records Act in federal court, arguing that White House documents belong to the president rather than the public. This legal battle follows previous controversies regarding the handling of classified materials during Trump's first term.
Why it matters
This case could fundamentally alter the legal framework governing presidential transparency and the preservation of historical records established after Watergate.
President Trump has famously pushed the bounds of executive power since he returned to the White House. In arguments Friday before a federal appeals court in Washington, administration lawyers will make an especially bold claim: that papers created in the White House belong to Donald Trump, not to the American people. The move comes amid a series of actions under Trump's second term to test the limits put in place after the Watergate scandal, and could be another case that ends up at the conservative-leaning Supreme Court.
Six months ago, the Justice Department moved to invalidate the Presidential Records Act, a federal law in place since 1978. Conservative lawyer Michael Edney cast the move in a long line of other attempts to pare back statutes from that era.
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