Comment In the nearly three weeks since the FBI searched former President Donald Trump’s Florida home to retrieve classified documents, the National Archives and Records Administration has been the target of a rash of threats and vitriol, according to people familiar with the situation. Civil servants charged by law with maintaining and securing the records of the US government were rattled. On Wednesday, the head of the agency sent an email to staff. Although academic and filled with legal references, the message from Acting Archivist Debra Steidel Wall was simple: Stay above the fray and stick to the mission. “NARA has received messages from the public accusing us of corruption and conspiracy against the former president, or congratulating NARA for ‘bringing him down,’” Steidel Wall wrote in the agency-wide message, obtained by The Washington Post. “It is neither accurate nor welcome.” The email capped a year-long saga that has embroiled the Archives — best known for its appearance in the 2004 Nicolas Cage film “National Treasure” — in a protracted battle with Trump over classified documents and other records obtained when he left authority . Archives officials emailed, called and pleaded with the former president and his representatives to follow the law and return the documents. When the Archives unearthed 15 boxes from Mar-a-Lago in January, agency officials found a mess of disorganized papers with no inventory. Highly classified material is mixed with newspaper clippings and dinner menus. And Archives officials believed more items were still missing. What happened next was an extraordinary step for America’s record holders: they referred the matter at the Justice Department, opening a dramatic new chapter in a simmering controversy. After the FBI investigation on August 8, Trump and his allies launched a barrage of attacks on one of the most apolitical arms of the federal bureaucracy. “They could have had it whenever they wanted — and that includes WAY BEFORE,” Trump wrote Aug. 12 on his Truth Social website. “All THEY HAD TO DO IS ASK. The biggest problem is, what will they do with the 33 million pages of documents, many of them classified, that President Obama brought to Chicago?” Trump was inaccurately referring to unclassified files being stored at an Archives facility in suburban Chicago for possible use in Barack Obama’s future presidential library. On Friday, the Hoffman Estates, Ill., police department increased patrols around the building after an uptick in online chatter about the facility, according to a person familiar with the situation. The police department declined to comment. Steidel Wall did not respond to requests for comment. The political storm has exposed the machinations of a central but neglected part of American democracy – to pull back the curtain on record-keeping practices that were enshrined in law in 1978 after the Watergate scandal. “Without keeping government records and without access to them, you can’t have an informed populace, and without an informed populace, you’re missing one of the key tools for preserving democracy,” said former Acting Archivist Trudy Peterson. who expressed concern that Trump’s rhetoric is damaging public perception of the Archives. “The system will not work if the neutrality of the National Archives is not protected.” This portrait of an agency under siege by a former president and his supporters is based on interviews with 14 current and former Archives officials, Trump advisers, historians and others familiar with the escalating controversy, many of whom spoke on condition of anonymity to to reveal internal discussions. Trump’s recent actions have fired his supporters into a fervor against the Archives, and he has authorized some of his most politically combative allies to represent him in negotiations with the agency. Representatives of former presidents were usually lawyers, historians or family members with no clear political agenda. Representatives typically deal with issues such as negotiating privilege claims, establishing presidential libraries, or researching presidential memoirs. But this was yet another rule that Trump broke. In June, as the Justice Department ramped up its hunt for Mar-a-Lago documents, Trump appointed two new archivists focused on releasing documents they claimed would exonerate Trump and damage the FBI: Cass Patel and John Solomon. Patel, a former White House and Pentagon aide, has tried for years to discredit the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russian meddling in the 2016 election. He recently promoted a children’s book about the scandal that portrays himself as a magician who uncovers a plot against “King Donald”. He’s also selling “K$H”-branded swag to raise money for a “wrongdoing” legal fund. After the FBI investigated Mar-a-Lago, Patel claimed in social media posts and interviews with right-wing media that the investigation was part of an ongoing effort to cover up these materials. “It’s always been about Russia Gate,” Patel told Trump’s Truth Social platform. Solomon, who runs the conservative website JustTheNews, published Steidel Wall’s letter to Trump’s legal representatives informing them of her decision to allow the FBI access to the boxes recovered in January. He claimed the letter was evidence of “the White House’s effort to facilitate a criminal investigation of the man who defeated Joe Biden in the 2020 election.” The Archives’ battle to secure records from Trump began while he was still president, according to records reviewed by The Post. Gary M. Stern, the agency’s top lawyer, began asking the former president’s lawyers to return two dozen boxes to the White House residence before he left. In an email Stern wrote to others, Trump adviser Pat Cipollone agreed with him. But Trump did not return them. For months, Stern emailed and called Trump’s representatives, simply urging them to send them back, using a combination of pleas and the occasional threat. “We know things are very chaotic,” he wrote in an email in May, after listing all the items the Archives wanted back. “…But it is absolutely necessary that we obtain and account for all presidential records.” Inside the Archives, the decision to give the FBI access to the 15 boxes — uncharted territory for the 2,800-person agency — was not taken lightly, officials said. Steidel Wall discussed and consulted with the organization’s tight-knit senior leadership team of career civil servants. There are no politicians currently appointed to the leadership. Steidel Wall started at the agency in 1991 as a trainee archivist, working on issues from establishing data standards to digitizing records on diskettes. The daughter of a Long Island police officer and a kindergarten teacher, she came to Washington to study history and government at Georgetown University, where she developed an interest in silent film, according to an interview with her hometown Suffolk Times. She eventually rose to become the agency’s chief of staff and deputy archivist. “The people handling this … are career public servants and have handled many sensitive issues, for both Democratic and Republican presidencies,” said a former Archives official. “We’ve always tried to get away from the politics of the situation and do our awful work. … If the records are tampered with, it doesn’t matter if it’s a Democrat or a Republican, we have to bring them back into the custody of the government. And if there is strange classified material, the materials are classified for a reason.” On Saturday, the heads of the House Intelligence and Oversight Committees issued a statement saying that Avril Haines, director of national intelligence, confirmed that the Justice Department and the intelligence community are working to assess the potential damage caused by the improper storage of classified information. documents. at Mar-a-Lago. An affidavit unsealed Friday showed 184 classified documents were found in the original 15 boxes of Mar-a-Lago files examined by the FBI. “The DOJ affidavit, partially unsealed yesterday, confirms our serious concern that among the documents stored at Mar-a-Lago were those that could compromise human resources,” Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn B. Maloney (DN.Y.) and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) said in a statement. “It is critical that the IC move quickly to assess and, if necessary, mitigate the damage caused — a process that should proceed in parallel with the DOJ’s criminal investigation.” For most of American history, presidents have kept their own documents and their personal ownership has never been challenged, according to a 2006 article authored by Stern, NARA’s general counsel since 1998. When Nixon resigned, he made plans to destroy the White House records, including the Oval Office tapes that had become central to the Watergate scandal. Congress stepped in and passed the Presidential Records Act, which requires the White House to preserve all written communication related to a president’s official duties — memos, letters, memos, emails, faxes and other materials — and to delivers to the Archives. Controversy over the Nixon tapes continued into the 1990s, with lawsuits from former aides and Cabinet members seeking to block disclosure and from public interest groups demanding access, according to the article. At the end of the Reagan administration, Stern, then with the American Civil Liberties Union, led a groundbreaking lawsuit to preserve White House records related to the Iran-Contra scandal. Investigations by presidential officials have in the past raised security risks. In 2005, former Clinton administration national security adviser Sandy Berger pleaded guilty to…
