Following the FBI’s raid of Mar-a-Lago, Trump was accused of violating the Presidential Records Act, and documents from the time of his presidency were taken from his Florida estate. However, a letter from the Obama Foundation confirms that documents from Barack Obama’s presidency were stored in a warehouse.
The 1978 law states that “the United States shall reserve and retain complete ownership, possession, and control of Presidential records.”
David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, said, “The Presidential Records Act is critical to our democracy, in which the government is held accountable by the people.”
However, while the Left has made it seem like this law is held sacred by our country’s leaders, presidential records are mostly kept hidden from the public for decades after the president leaves office.
The Nixon Library did not release all his secret tapes until 2013 – 39 years after Nixon left office. Similarly, the Lyndon B. Johnson Library delayed the release of his secret tapes until 2016, which was 47 years afterhe left office.
The Obama administration didn’t do things any differently, transporting 30 million pages of records to a storage facility in Chicago.
Although the NARA said they “assumed exclusive legal and physical custody of Obama’s presidential records when President Barack Obama left office in 2017,” a 2018 letter from the Obama Foundation to the NARA reveals that the Obama team stored both “classified and unclassified” documents at a warehouse in Hoffman Estates, IL.
The letter also vows that the digitization of the unclassified records will be completed “no later than August 21, 2021.”
Despite 95% of Obama administration records being “born digital,” meaning they could very easily be released online, over five years after his presidency ended, the National Archives webpage shows that no pages have been digitized or disclosed yet.
While Americans are mostly prohibited from seeing official records from Obama’s presidency, Barack and Michelle Obama were advanced $65 million for their memoirs.
In 2011, Obama’s Justice Department proposed that federal agencies should be able to falsely claim that FOIA-requested documents didn’t exist. This recommendation was criticized as a law that would “permit federal law enforcement agencies to actively lie to the American people.”
So, while Obama touted his administration as “the most transparent” in history, it was really no more open than the Nixon administration in terms of government secrecy.
People are able to file requests under the Freedom of Information Act, but even getting a response from presidential libraries can take years, or more than a decade if the information is classified.
Donald Trump addressed this double standard on August 12, saying, “President Barack Hussein Obama kept 33 million pages of documents, much of them classified. How many of them pertained to nuclear? Word is, lots!”
Trump also asked whether federal agents would be “breaking into Obama’s ‘mansion’ in Martha’s Vineyard.”
The answer, of course, is no. While Trump’s documents were kept within his highly-secure mansion in Florida, Obama’s documents were in a Chicago-area warehouse, and yet Trump is still the one being attacked by the hypocritical Left.
