Historians sue to stop Trump from rerunning his Mar-a-Lago document scheme

A group of historians has filed suit against the Trump administration over a scheme they fear could be used to give President Donald Trump a free pass to rerun his scheme of removing thousands of documents to his home at Mar-a-Lago in South Florida.

According to Lawfare's Anna Bower, "Historians [sued] over [the Office of Legal Counsel] opinion claiming that the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional. Suit seeks declaration that the PRA is constitutional — and an injunction to bar Trump from taking Presidential records at conclusion of his term in office."

The OLC briefing would seek to invalidate the Presidential Records Act, passed in 1978 as part of a broad suite of reforms enacted after the Watergate scandal to ensure presidents cannot hide their dealings from the public. As Jan-Werner Mueller wrote for The Guardian, "no one up until Trump appeared to have experienced [the PRA] as remotely burdensome."

However, Trump clashed headlong with the PRA after boxes containing thousands of documents were found to have been improperly moved from the National Archives and Records Administration to Mar-a-Lago.

Many of these documents were highly classified, which formed the basis of federal charges against Trump brought by special counsel Jack Smith, though a far-right Trump-appointed judge dismissed the charges, and the DOJ declined to appeal that decision after Trump was re-elected in 2024.

At the time, Trump claimed the PRA allowed him to remove documents at his discretion, which was not true and, in fact, close to the opposite of what the PRA requires.

In addition to seeking invalidation of the OLC memo, the lawsuit requests a court "Enjoin the individual Defendants, other than President Trump in his official capacity, to disclose to the Court any known instances in which the President destroys, converts for personal use, or otherwise fails to maintain Presidential records as required by the PRA," and more specifically enjoin Trump "from retaining, destroying, disposing, or otherwise handling Presidential records in a manner not in accordance with the PRA, and to turn over all Presidential records in his actual or constructive possession to NARA as required by the PRA."