We Saved the Mar-a-Lago Documents!

TL;DR

Legal Eagle sued to preserve Trump's Mar-a-Lago documents after the Trump OLC declared the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional, and won a court preservation order.

Key Points

• 1.Trump's OLC declared the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional on April 1, 2026. The memo argued the PRA exceeds Congress's enumerated powers and aggrandizes the legislative branch, effectively claiming Trump owns all White House documents and can destroy them freely.
• 2.The Presidential Records Act has a 50-year legal history rooted in Watergate. Congress passed its 1974 predecessor specifically targeting Nixon, whose attempt to control his own records was rejected by the Supreme Court in Nixon v. Administrator of General Services.
• 3.A federal judge issued a sweeping preservation order on April 13, 2026. Judge Theodore Chung ordered the National Archives to preserve all records from Trump's first administration in its custody, preventing shredding, deletion, or disappearance of documents during litigation.
• 4.OLC's memo ignores the controlling Nixon v. Administrator of General Services Supreme Court precedent. The court had already affirmed Congress's right to preserve presidential records for historical, governmental, and public accountability purposes — OLC cherry-picked only minor dicta.
• 5.The fundamental flaw in OLC's argument is that the PRA was passed and signed into law, not a congressional subpoena. President Carter signed and celebrated the PRA in 1978, which the Supreme Court's own logic treats as a waiver of separation-of-powers objections.
• 6.Attorney Kell McClanahan filed a letter citing the collapse of the 'presumption of regularity' doctrine. The OLC memo destroyed the court's ability to assume good-faith compliance, especially since DOGE-related cases had used PRA compliance as a reason to deny preservation orders.
• 7.The DOJ revealed at a status conference that the National Archives may never have seen the Mar-a-Lago documents. The judge ordered a sworn declaration by April 22nd explaining exactly what happened to records seized by the FBI and what was returned.
• 8.Discovery was granted, allowing subpoenas of Trump personally and the Mar-a-Lago Club. This unusually broad scope for a FOIA case means correspondence and document copies held privately by Trump could be obtained, potentially revealing more than the official records themselves.