President Clinton ended his two terms with 78 million pages of
official records.
President Bush had 40 million pages.
President Obama 30 million transcripts,
letters,
tweets,
photos,
classified documents.
All of these are supposed to go to the National Archives supposed
to FBI agencies,
classified records from former president trump's home,
classified documents from President biden's time as vice prez.
Now the Justice department is investigating why and how classified documents got
to the home of former president donald trump and to the home and office of president biden after he
served as vice president.
Here's how records are handled when a president leaves office and how some might fall through the
cracks legally the president or vice president are the
custodians of public records they create while in office and on the last day of their
term,
they are supposed to move all of it to the national Archives.
When you walk into the White House after a new president is elected,
the White House is empty.
The offices are empty,
the computers are wiped clean.
There's no documents,
there's no files.
It's just empty.
David Marshak has written about the history of presidential transitions and was involved in
President Biden's transition in 2020 and worked in Clinton's 1992 White House.
I was young and I had a lot more hair when those literal boxes of records are
moved.
The archives become the custodian.
Even for things like the president and vice president.
Social media accounts.
The archives keep all of the classified documents in a secure location and keep
the rest at a former presidents presidential library or a storage area until it's
established at President Kennedy's library.
You can see his notes and doodles from meetings at the CUBA missile crisis at President
Reagan's.
You can see artifacts from his attempted assassination at President Bush's.
You can see his notes from his speech announcing two airplanes have
crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist
attack on our country,
preserving a President's records is a big deal.
It's the law and it's also important so that future researchers,
scholars,
historians,
documentarians can get access to these documents to document
history,
to learn from president successes and mistakes and to avoid those mistakes in the future,
which is why it's a law that every record that deals with the president's work in
office must be sent to the archives.
But it's the president's staff that is actually in charge of doing that.
This is where things can get messy.
The archives just offer guidance.
They aren't checking these boxes,
leaving the White House.
The challenges people in the White House work up until January 20,
national security issues don't stop because there's a new president.
These people are busy.
They're exhausted.
They're trying to figure out their future.
They're trying to do their current job and you add to that the burden of preserving
all their documents.
It's a lot a person familiar with the classified documents found on premises used by
biden told the Wall Street journal that one was related to a trip to Ukraine.
he took a few days before his vice presidential term ends,
It was just one stop in a hectic travel itinerary during the last two weeks before
the transition vice president,
United States for 48 more hours.
When the president travels,
their staff goes with them.
That means the staff's not in the office to preserve the records and it just adds to the
challenge.
It adds to the pressure and it reduces the amount of time staff has to preserve their
records.
Trump's last days were also chaotic,
not because of travel,
but because he was in the middle of his second impeachment AIDS at the time said they delayed
packing because of trump's attempts to overturn the election.
The White House also typically sends records to the archives throughout the administration as
they are done with them.
So it's not a scramble to send all four years of records all at once.
An archives official said at an event in January of 2021.
That didn't really happen with Trump usually by transition time.
We've got,
we've got a majority of the paper records already in our physical custody.
We really couldn't start picking up until January if you're part of a white
house where the president has lost the election.
It's a little more chaotic,
a little more stressed and staff start to start to thin out during this
transition period.
And so the people that are left there on January 20 at noon are usually a
very,
very few people standing and they have a big burden.
Typically if presidential public records are found after the end of a presidency,
their return to the archives,
but they're not normally classified trump's records.
Investigation centers around a number of different kinds of records,
not just classified ones.
The investigation only began when the archives realized they were missing.
Important ones like correspondence between trump and north korean leader Kim jong un
trump's team failed to hand those over,
resulting in a search that led to the discovery of numerous classified documents.
Biden's investigation focuses only on classified documents that were found at a
private office and his home.
While the Justice Department is investigating any wrongdoing,
the archives goal has remained the same.
Make sure they have all these public records.