The Daily Fuckup

By Sept. 6, 2021, the Trump records dispute had already moved beyond a routine paperwork chase. The National Archives was telling Trump representatives that it needed help recovering presidential records that had not been transferred out of the White House system and into federal custody after the administration ended. In a May 2021 letter later released by the Archives, the agency said it was still working through problems in the transfer of Trump-era records and that some paper and textual records could not be accounted for.

The letter named specific missing items. Among them were correspondence between Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a letter President Barack Obama left for Trump during the 2017 transition, and roughly two dozen boxes of original presidential records that had been kept in the White House residence. The Archives said those records were supposed to be turned over under the Presidential Records Act and asked Trump’s former White House lawyers for immediate help resolving the gap.

That was the core of the story on Sept. 6: not a finished national-security case, but an unresolved records problem. The government was saying it did not yet have custody of everything it should have had. Trump and people around him had been told the missing material needed to be accounted for. The question was whether the transfer could be completed cleanly or whether the missing items would keep turning up as a larger compliance problem.

The narrower, more consequential point is that the public did not yet know the full shape of the dispute. Later developments in 2022 would widen the case dramatically. But as of this edition date, the documented facts were already enough to make the issue uncomfortable for Trump: the Archives said presidential records were missing, and it was still asking for them back.