The Daily Fuckup

On May 6, 2021, the National Archives and Records Administration told lawyers for former President Donald Trump that roughly two dozen boxes of presidential records had not yet been returned to federal custody. The agency said the missing material included correspondence between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, along with a letter former President Barack Obama left for Trump during the transition.

The notice matters because presidential records are not personal property. Under the Presidential Records Act, records created or received in the course of official duties belong to the United States and are supposed to be preserved and transferred to the government when a president leaves office. That includes letters, briefing material, diplomatic correspondence, and other documents tied to official work.

The May 6 letter did not say the records had been destroyed or permanently lost. It said they were unaccounted for and had not been returned. That distinction is important, because the immediate issue was custody and inventory: whether the government could locate documents that should have been in its possession after the Trump presidency ended.

The items named in the notice were not ordinary scraps of paper. The Kim Jong Un correspondence sat at the center of Trump’s highly publicized outreach to North Korea, and the Obama letter was part of the handoff between presidents, a record that would normally be expected to remain in the official file. The Archives asked Trump’s representatives to help locate the material and return it.

The episode became part of a broader records dispute that continued after Trump left office, but the core fact from that May 6 warning is straightforward: the National Archives said important presidential records were still missing from its count and needed to be found.