The Daily Fuckup

The public record for Nov. 17, 2021 is narrower than the broader Trump records fight that was still unfolding around it. That day, the Justice Department’s Chief FOIA Officers Council held a virtual meeting with National Archives officials participating, and the discussion focused on FOIA administration, records processing, and the work agencies were doing to manage public access requests. NARA said many of the requests it handles involve archival records created by executive branch agencies and the White House, which are transferred into its legal custody at the end of an administration. ([justice.gov](https://www.justice.gov/oip/chief-foia-officers-council-meeting-transcript-november-17-2021))

The National Archives also makes archived White House websites available as historical records. NARA explains that those sites are preserved in the Executive Office of the President Electronic Records Archive and then “frozen” so the public can view them online as historical material rather than living government pages. NARA’s archived Trump White House site is part of that collection, alongside archived sites from earlier administrations. ([archives.gov](https://www.archives.gov/presidential-records/research/archived-white-house-websites))

That framework matters because presidential records are not treated as private property once an administration ends. Under the Presidential Records Act, the official records of the president and staff belong to the United States, and NARA takes custody when the president leaves office. The law also sets out a delayed FOIA access structure for those records after the end of the administration. In its Nov. 17 meeting, NARA officials were talking about that larger records pipeline and the agency’s workload, not announcing a new Trump-related ruling. ([archives.gov](https://www.archives.gov/news/topics/presidential-records-act))

The Trump-era records disputes were still very much alive elsewhere, including separate litigation over records sought by Congress and other requests for presidential materials. But the clean, documented event on Nov. 17 was the FOIA Council meeting itself, where the archives and Justice Department were discussing how the federal records system works and how it is supposed to keep presidential records in the public trust. That is the part of the story the record actually supports. ([justice.gov](https://www.justice.gov/oip/chief-foia-officers-council-meeting-transcript-november-17-2021))