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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The Battle Over Presidential Records, from Nixon to Trump
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The Battle Over Presidential Records, from Nixon to Trump
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:18]
B
You're listening to the political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggatt and I'm a senior editor at the New Yorker. In November of 2020, just days after Joe Biden won the presidential election to 20, Jill Lepore wrote an essay for the New Yorker titled will Trump Burn the Evidence? It was about the possibility that when Trump left office and archivist came to get his papers, official documents would be missing. Now, we know that Trump did take records with him when he left, but he's not the first president to stash or even to destroy his records. Jill is a historian at Harvard, and she finds herself facing a question that she heard again and again during Trump's presidency. Is this worse than anything we've seen before? So, hi, Jill, thank you so much for coming on.
- [02:04]
C
Hey, yeah, thanks for having me.
- [02:06]
B
So you once asked the question, will Trump burn the evidence? And now we sort of have an answer to that. So I'm wondering how the recent revelations compare to what you were expecting.
- [02:20]
C
I, like everyone else, you know, read that indictment with great fascination, partly because it's just so Keystone Cops like, no, I couldn't possibly have anticipated that. And the photograph of the boxes in the glitzy shower beneath the glass chandelier, I mean, it's. It's cockamamie, right? I mean, I wrote the piece. I pitched the piece and wrote the piece because just as a historian, everybody was thinking about, well, what will happen to Trump in the post presidency? I think, you know, as before, there was really a sense that his contestation of the election results would go for so long. No one anticipated the insurrection. I mean, there was a lot that has been unanticipated. So my concern was just this kind of narrow question of if anyone ever wants to find out what he did as president. It seemed to me it would be difficult to do because there was no reason to believe that he would abide by the Presidential Records act, which is the federal legislation that decrees that his papers are not his personal property. And Trump thinks everything is personal property. So I was just worried kind of narrowly about that.
- [03:25]
B
Yeah. When did the Federal Records act get passed? Like, when. At what point did we decide these records do not belong to the President, they belong to us, you know, the United States.
- [03:36]
C
Yeah. So the Federal Records act is from the 1950s and applies to federal records, but not the presidency. The Presidential Records act is from 1978, is in a post Watergate thing, kind of. Interestingly, I'd written about this years ago. There's no such provision for the Supreme Court. So Supreme Court Justices papers are their personal property still the way it used to be for the president before Nixon. Wow.
- [03:58]
B
Lifetime tenure, personal papers. It seems like that's the job to have.
- [04:02]
C
You know, I. I think there are arguments about why that's a good thing, why that's right, and why that's in the interest of justice. And there are real criticisms to be made, I think, even about the Presidential Records Act. That kind of radical transparency in some ways impedes people's ability to govern. But the Presidential Records act, in answer narrowly to your question, dates to 1978. And there was a huge battle between Congress and the executive branch over Nixon's tapes. Nixon resigned essentially, rather than give them over. And then Congress was like, okay, great that you resigned, but we still want the tapes. And then there was this ensuing legal battle which resulted in the Presidential Records act, which said, what you produce as president is just not your personal papers, been contested and contested and contested and mostly evaded because it's almost impossible to enforce. And you'll notice, I'm sure, your listeners who are listening to the political scene Are people that did read the indictment really? It's not about the Presidential Records Act. Right. Like that ship sailed. Right. It's about the Espionage Act.
- [05:07]
B
So, yeah. Before we get into the details of the Espionage act and sort of what Trump is being indicted for, I wondered if we could just talk a little bit more about the pre Presidential Records act era and sort of what happened with the records, you know, back then. Like, do you just take the things that are incriminating? Do you just burn the things that are incriminating and leave the rest behind so that history has a good picture of you? I guess. What did people do before we had protocols?
- [05:34]
C
Yeah. So, I mean, if you think about it, you know, you think about George Washington inaugurated in 1789, you know, there are monarchs reigning all over Europe. Right. There's no sense that the papers of the executive belong to the people. Right. That's an invention. It takes a long time to take hold. But there is an origin for it within the idea that, you know, from the very first, the deliberations of the House of Representatives were public. The public could come watch Congress deliberate and that Congress had to publish its journals. This was considered a huge triumph for, know, lowercase r Republicanism. The idea that the people shall govern themselves. And it. And it really was. That's just new. Right. That the doors of government should be open to the people is a new idea. It's kind of a big deal. If you go to the old state house in Massachusetts, they point out that it was like the first place where the public was allowed in to watch the legislature deliberate. They put in seats for the public. Like, you elected these people. You should. They're accountable to you. Right. So that's like prefatory to the idea that like, then what they did, even when you weren't in the room with them, should be scrutinizable by you. Scrutinizable is not a word. But. Right. Like, so people kept their papers all the time. Like when you picture, picture like an 18th century desk with all the little cubbies, like, people had all kinds of ways to keep their papers because you don't have like Spotlight Search. Right. People had really careful records and someone like Washington did in fact have careful records, but they were useful to you while you were in office. So the question of what you would do when you left office was really the only operative question is how would these documents inform my legacy? So what is the use of these documents for history? And then you would make the decision, as many often did. I'll just Burn it all. So you go through the records of past presidents. A lot of them are like, my daughter started the fire in the backyard. Or like, we got two garbage bins. Or, you know, they're just these crazy tales. Like, we put them in a box in the attic, but then I told my mistress she would have to destroy them more. It looks like chicanery. But on the other hand, it wasn't illegal. Like, there was nothing saying, you can't do this. And people who weren't presidents did this all the time. Right. Like, Kafka wanted his papers burned.
- [07:52]
B
People love destroying their papers. If I had papers, I would probably destroy them, too.
- [07:56]
C
Yeah, exactly. I compulsively delete my email. I can't stand the idea that email exists. So as private individuals in an age of paper people, pretty used to deliberately burning their papers. But also, papers burned all the time. Like, everyone's got fires in their houses. So the papers of the presidents were considered their private papers. And they're also, for a long time, wasn't any other real option. Right. There was no national archives until the 1930s. There really was no official government way that Congress was involved, which would have had to legislate such a thing in preserving the papers of the executive branch or even of the legislative branch. So there was a Library of Congress, but it didn't have an archive. It's really not Till, like, the 1880s, when the American historical profession is becoming a profession. And so, you know, these professors of American history start saying, we would like to keep these papers.
- [08:51]
B
I mean, it seems like a really tough battle to get the most powerful person in the United States to hand over their stuff. It seems like historians versus the government. Yeah, it's kind of cool. The historians won.
- [09:06]
C
Yeah, well, they did. But I think most historians would say it was kind of a partial victory. I mean, there are two ways in which it's a partial victory. One, presidents evade this requirement all the time. Right? That's what all the like, well, what about the Reagan guest logs? Or what about do emails count? What does scraps of paper count? So although many people are kind of just devising new ways to keep records and then arguing that these records don't fall under the provisions of the Presidential Records Act. But the other way in which historical historians really don't win out. And I say this in the piece because I talked to all the past archivists of the United States who are still living, and a number of them said, and I just do think this is quite true, that before presidents were required to turn their papers over to the National Archives. People were more frank on paper. You just kind of picture the West Wing vibe. Like, whatever you do, don't write it down. We'll just go for a walk and talk. Like, that whole walk and talk thing is, I'm not going to send you a memo about this because a memo is discoverable. But our conversation, I mean, unless one of us writes it down in the diary, which, whatever you do, don't keep a diary if you're working in the White House, you know, that. That. That transparency is an impediment to candor.
- [10:18]
B
One thing you mentioned is that, you know, especially, like, in Washington's case, the papers were, you know, maybe some of them would be of use to his successor, but they were also mostly just, like, his personal stuff. You know, especially thinking about, you know, we don't have the details of what. What kinds of documents Trump had, although there have been kind of descriptions that they contain national security secrets and whatnot. I guess I'm just wondering, like, to what extent the kinds of documents that presidents are supposed to turn over today are actually used on an ongoing basis by other people in the government versus, like, whether these are supposed to be documents that are going to be used by historians are of more, like, symbolic importance. Like, you know, you. You read about. I think one document that Trump supposedly has is basically something that kind of outlines our plan of attack against Iran. And I'm wondering, like, is there a world in which Joe Biden is like, hey, get me that plan of attack document from the National Archive? And then it's like, not there, or whether, you know, there are copies of these things or whether it's mostly digital and whether the paper copies that Trump has, like, actually aren't. You know, no one is really looking for them usually.
- [11:29]
C
Mm. There are copies. I don't think that Biden needs these documents to know what our attack plan is for Iran. Right. And that's one of the ways in which it's really not about the Presidential Records act, because in most cases, the departments keep these things. And I talked to the historian Fred Logwal when I was working on this piece on what Trump would do with his papers, and he said, you know, like, the consequences for the historical record are much less than we might think or than in even 20 years ago because of duplication, paper duplication, but essentially digital duplication. And as you know, if you've ever tried to fully erase something on your laptop, it's very hard to actually delete something, even though you think you've deleted it. So it's of less consequence, I suppose, for historians than. Than one might suppose. But historians are 10 people with, like, leather patches on their blazers. Like, it's the public that really cares. Right. And what the public cares about is the integrity of the office and these matters of national security. Right. So I would be worried as a historian, and the reason I wrote this piece is I was worried that a lot of the things that we in future as historians would want to know in terms of malfeasance within the Trump White House would be difficult to discern because there could have been a very effective effort made to really scrub the record. I don't think there's much evidence that the Trump administration was particularly effective at anything, and certainly not bureaucratically effective. So the idea that Jared Kushner is out there leading a campaign to go department to department to department to make sure records about the Muslim travel ban are tidied up to make it look constitutional, I just don't. I just don't see the world in which that ever happened.
- [13:20]
B
I'm wondering, since it was a norm for presidents to keep their papers for so long, and since there are copies of all of these things, why do you think that this should be seen as a significant scandal? Obviously, there's like, the concern that, you know, Trump has these documents that contain secrets. Like, there are lots of things that you can do with a classified document. Is that the reason why this is such a big deal, or is it just his general disrespect for are norms?
- [13:48]
C
There are plenty of Americans and plenty of Republican political leaders who would say it's not a big deal, that this is okay. People in office take their papers home purposefully or inadvertently all the time. Sometimes those materials are classified. We certainly know that there's a huge over classification problem. Like, there are a lot of arguments that could be put forward to gain, say, the importance of this set of charges. I think most of them are kind of moral shambles, honestly, partly because if the allegations in the indictment are proven, there's nothing inadvertent about this violation of the Espionage act or a series of violations. These documents were, even if they were originally shipped inadvertently, someone mistaking them as papers that weren't covered by the Presidential Records act, they were shuffled around and hidden, and people were lied to. So there's that. There's that element of misconduct. But the rule of law issue is that whether or not a lot of material is classified that ought not to be classified, the material described in this indictment certainly should have been classified. This, a lot of it is described, insofar as we can know about it, is really very important classification.
- [15:08]
B
That's been one of the more striking things about the indictment, I think, is just when this story began. I think that one of the documents that was said to be in Trump's possession were letters from foreign leaders that had been written to him. And you could almost get the sense, like, oh, maybe he just wants a keepsake, the way that I might want to keep a letter that David Remnick wrote to me. But as more details have come out, it seems like these are documents that are not, you know, they're not falling under this category of, like, something that probably shouldn't have been classified to begin with or something that feels like, you know, it's personal to Trump. It seems like these are just things that you shouldn't really have unless you're the active President of the United States.
- [15:46]
C
Yeah, I think that's clear. I mean, I'm sure there's a lot of stuff that's in those boxes that doesn't come up in the indictment that is like, you know, the North Korean love letters or whatever. Yeah, right. I'm sure a lot of it is just weird souvenirs and junk. You know, other Americans are prosecuted for violating the Espionage act for taking classified information out of the office.
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B
What do those prosecutions usually look like? Like, I know that, like, Julian Assange was prosecuted under the Espionage act during Trump's presidency, like, reality Winner, but those cases are obviously much different than this one. Although there have been plenty of instances of, like, junior and senior intelligence analysts keeping records in their homes and being prosecuted. I think one of the more recent cases resulted in, like, a 10 year prison sentence, or the person is facing 10 years now. And so people are saying that maybe we should be looking to that as, like, a template for what could happen to Trump.
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C
Yeah, Trump's not going to prison over this. I mean, I think it's closer to something like the David Petraeus when he got two years of probation and a $40,000 fine for sharing classified information that I think was in a DIA of his with his biographer slash mistress, which is very Trumpy in its own way, kind of brings it all together.
- [17:02]
B
He's not going to prison for showing the US Plan of attack in Iran to a buddy. I mean, do you think that we take people who are at higher levels of government and we just don't take it as seriously when they take classified records home? They're kind of above the law in ways Even though they're not supposed to be above the law?
- [17:20]
C
No, I just. I mean, I just think realistically he's not going to prison over this. I do think this is not the last indictment. I also don't think this indictment is likely to run its course before the next election. I mean, I think this is going to be kind of a slow process. It's very much in Trump's interest to slow it down as much as possible, and there are ways to do that. But historians are terrible prophets, and so we should never be asked about what's going to happen.
- [17:50]
B
I won't ask you to predict what'll happen. But do you think. You say that you don't think he'll go to prison. Do you think that he should go to prison for this? Or is this, I guess, like, how do you feel about this scandal as a historian? And I guess, do you think that we should be taking it more seriously?
- [18:06]
C
I do think we should take these charges very seriously. I also think we need to take very seriously the consequences of continued indictments against former presidents. And this was the issue with the New York indictment when people said it is unprecedented. In a way. I think that indictment was a little bit about setting up the future indictments so they wouldn't have to bear the burden of being the first and could actually be observed on the merits of the case. I don't know that that was deliberate, but I think that's how that plays out. It is a terrible thing to live in a country where when people leave office, they are prosecuted by their political enemies on allegations of misconduct. Right. There are countries all over the world that have suffered under that kind of a political arrangement for generations. And it is terrible and it is horrible, and it decays everything that we hold dear about living in a civil society under a rule of law. So I just don't think there's any glee to be had around the prospect of, you know, lock him up. Like, lock him up is not a lot better than lock her up. Yeah. So I am necessarily of two minds. Like, sure, he should be held accountable. This, you know, if these allegations are true, these are felonies, what should happen? You know, I'm not in that. I'm not in that position, but I don't think glee is the response.
- [19:31]
B
Yeah, definitely not glee, I guess.
- [19:34]
C
Yeah.
- [19:35]
B
I mean, it's just. It's really hard. I think, on one hand, it's like, this question of, like, to prosecute or to not prosecute, and it's difficult when Biden is also running for reelection. Like, do you think that this would be slightly less tricky if Biden were not an active political opponent?
- [19:52]
C
I think from the prosecutorial vantage, it's quite similar to the impeachments. I thought the first impeachment was less well founded than the second impeachment, which I thought, okay, after January 6th, like, how can you not convict this guy? But at the same time, I was deeply saddened by both impeachments because before Nixon, impeachment was meant to be the sword that was never removed from its scabbard. Like, the idea of impeachment, the reason it's in the Constitution, is that it would be a deterrent. And if you used it in a way, it loses its deterrent ability. But since Reagan, there have been impeachment articles introduced against every single president. And it's just part of now politics as usual to say, well, impeach him, impeach her, like, that's just the thing now. And indict him, indict her is gonna now be a thing. And that is a huge loss. But you can't not file criminal charges against someone who has broken the law because it's going to be bad for you politically. You can't, like, the same way with the impeachment. The impeachments did not serve the Democrats well. They didn't succeed. They gave Trump a lot of ammunition in many ways. And the same thing will be true with the indictments. That doesn't mean it's still not the right thing to do. Not everything comes down to what's good politically for your political party. I just find it bizarre that Trump gets away with saying Democrats are doing this for political reasons. It really only hurts the Democrats.
- [21:29]
B
Coming up, Jill Lepore on how Trump tried to control the narrative of his presidency.
- [21:36]
C
Katie.
- [21:38]
D
I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's global editorial director. I'm Michael Colory, Wired's Director of Consumer, Tech and Culture.
- [21:45]
C
And I'm Lauren Good.
- [21:46]
B
I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show, Uncanny Valley is all.
- [21:50]
C
About the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley.
- [21:54]
D
At Wired, we're constantly reporting on how technology is changing every aspect of our lives. So each week on the show, we get together to talk about one of the biggest stories in tech.
- [22:04]
C
Right?
- [22:04]
D
So whether we're talking about privacy, AI, social media, or a major tech figure, we will always explain the Silicon Valley forces behind these stories and how they affect you. Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.
- [22:25]
B
When Trump invokes politics. He talks about how Biden has classified documents at home and how, you know, obviously there was the whole thing with Hillary and her emails, and even Mike Pence was found to have documents. I mean, what is the main difference here between Trump and those other politicians? Is it just that he refused to give the documents back, or is it that he's Trump?
- [22:50]
C
I mean, I think it's a lot of things. I wrote a piece a few years ago, maybe 2017, soon after Trump took office, when people in his administration or in his circle started being arrested. Maybe it was after Paul Manafort was indicted, because I was kind of exhausted already as a historian of people saying all the time, has this ever happened before? Like, the craziest things would happen in that White House, and, you know, reporters would call up and say, you know, professor, historian, has this ever happened before? And you're like, I just don't think so. Like, I just. No, this is nuts. And so I dug up out of the library book that was published in 1974 as part of the public record from the Watergate proceedings, when the House committee that was conducting its investigation of Watergate called up the Yale historian C. Van Woodward and said, is this stuff that all presidents do, like this Nixon shenanigans? We have to make a case to the public. And a lot of the Republicans on our committee are like, isn't this just what presidents do? And we're like, I don't think so, but we kind of need to know. And so he called up C. V. Woodward, said, could you get together historians? Can you come up with a report that will be of use to the Watergate committee in gaining that perspective? And Woodward's like. I think he was like, this is exciting because no one ever really needs a historian, but, like, they really needed a historian. And so he called, like, three or four of his colleagues, and they all. They each called, like, three or four of their graduate students. And over a matter of, like, six weeks, they assigned, like, a president to everyone. And people went through the historical records, and there was a report written, brief report, on every single presidential administration and what charges of misconduct had been leveled against each American president. And were they all bad? Yeah, well, no. They're. They're actually. There is a lot of crummy stuff, and there's just a lot of petty graft, people trying to make money off of being in the presidency. It's actually less the presidents themselves, but the sort of, like, yeah, like the Billy Carters, you know what I mean? Like, the Jared Kushner's like, people you shouldn't be bringing into your White House. But, like, it's just my wife's cousin, and he can't get a job. Like, and then he turns out to be a, you know, petty thief. And. But I went through it and I read it, and there's a little bit of, you know, kind of selling of national secrets here and there, not by the presidents, but by people in their administration. And the only person who isn't involved in anything is William Henry Harrison, but he's the guy, remember, who didn't wear a coat on Inauguration Day, and he died within a month of, like, pneumonia.
- [25:36]
B
He didn't have time. Yeah. To.
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C
He didn't have time to break any laws. Yeah. Anyway, they wrote this report, and the kind of conclusion was, you know, in terms of the question they'd been charged to ask, do all presidents do this kind of thing that Nixon had done? And the answer was no. Like, none of these guys in the office of the President had headed a conspiracy to cover up evidence of malfeasance that they themselves had actually commissioned. In any case, this was a very roundabout way to say, yeah. So when people call up and say, has this ever happened before Trump? The answer is almost always no. No, this is Trump.
- [26:13]
B
I mean, what exactly sets him apart? I mean, looking at this classified documents case specifically, is it like, the number of documents that he took? Because I know that, you know, with Biden, I think it was only 10 were found, whereas with Trump, it's supposedly hundreds. Is it the fact that he fought so hard to keep the documents after the National Archive asked him to give them back? You know, obstruction of justice is part of the case against him. It goes beyond the Espionage Act. And so, yeah, I'm wondering if you could sort of explain why it is that this is different.
- [26:43]
C
So if you go through the memos that were sent by Don McGahn, who is the White House counsel, early in the Trump administration, telling people exactly what the requirements of the Presidential Records act are, and those memos, I wrote about those in my article on the Trump papers. And you go through the public statements that Trump himself made during the campaign in 2016 and early in office in 2017, there's a hugely abundant documentary trail that tells us that Trump and his administration entirely understood the necessity of preserving these records and turning them over to the National Archives at noontime on January 20, 2021. So there's the willfulness piece that seems quite different. I think it was easy in the early era of email, say, maybe the George H.W. bush administration and the George W. Bush administrations to say we didn't really understand that email fell under this, or we just didn't archive it, we didn't even know how to keep email, or we wiped our servers all the time. I tend not to believe those explanations, but it actually doesn't seem that crazy to me. I don't have email from 1997, and I did email in 1997, so, I mean, even down to Hillary Clinton should have known better. I mean, that just seems like very weak management capacity. But to your point, when asked, it's turned over, or ideally it's turned over. I haven't followed the ins and outs of the Hillary Clinton email stuff. I kind of was with Bernie Sanders when he said, enough already, we're tired of hearing about your email. I don't know, maybe there is a case that the Hillary Clinton stuff is worse than it looks. To me, I plead lack of information there, but the Biden stuff seems messy and sloppy and negligent, which is bad. But this seems, on the basis of the allegations, willful, purposeful, deliberate, conspiratorial and criminal. And this isn't, has no legal bearing, but as a citizen, it just seems profoundly reckless and self aggrandizing. Like the idea that in order to feel like a potent man, Trump needs to be able to pull out these classified documents and say, lookie, lookie, what a powerful person I am.
- [29:15]
B
And that does seem to be the, at least one of the motivations. I mean, you know, with one of the documents that he's said to have in his possession is, you know, it seems like he was showing it to, you know, to friends or to allies. You know, we'll find out as the case goes on and as more reporting comes out. But it seems like he was looking for bragging rights.
- [29:35]
C
Yeah, and also kind of a profiteering. Right. Like I remain a person whose proximity you seek and whose patronage you seek because I am the person who has these kinds of documents. I mean, I guess contrast that to the delegates to the constitutional convention in 1787 in Philadelphia took a vow that they would not discuss or reveal anything about from their own notes or from conversations about what happened at that convention for 50 years. And they actually didn't, you know, and maybe to the peril of the country, because one of the things they covered up was the kinds of compromises they made over slavery. I, you know, I'm the first to indict those guys for what they failed to do in 1787. But I do respect that they kept it secret because they pledged to keep it secret in the interest what they believe to be the best interest of the country, and that there is no capacity whatsoever on Trump's part to do anything that could possibly be considered in the best interest of the interest of the country. I just would say, you know, from the vantage of being a citizen of this country, it's just horrifying.
- [30:46]
B
One thing that I've been thinking about is just sort of what we expect, not just from our current president, but from someone who was a former president, like, what that role looks like, having had access to just extremely high levels of information and power, and then putting that aside. And, I mean, one thing I've been thinking about is, like, Obama and how he's been getting asked a lot of questions lately about, like, UFOs, and he's sort of like, I don't know anything about that. But you assume that he probably does. Right. Like, he was probably briefed on these things when he was in office. And I don't know if he was told at the time or if he just kind of intuits that, like, it's not really his place to spill the beans now that he's out of office. I mean, are we. Obviously there are these very clear laws surrounding records and what you do with them afterward and where they're kept, but in terms of disinformation that you have in your head, all former presidents have a lot of that, I guess. To what extent are they just supposed to pretend like they don't have it or step in when they actually think it would be, you know, for the good of the country to talk about these things? Maybe some of this comes from him not quite understanding how classified information is dealt with, like, kind of, like, verbally.
- [32:02]
C
Yeah. I mean, often people remark on this as a perversity of classification and over classification is that even if something is known by the public and has been reported in the newspaper, if your access to it was through a classified document, you have to pretend that you don't know it. And I. I think people who served in the federal government take that extremely seriously. There are huge legal implications. And more importantly, I think people take a real vow of public service. And if you get a Top Secret clearance or a secret clearance, it's because you believe in the foreign policy mission of the United States, and therefore you would honor that secrecy. It's not even a thing to imagine, to raise. It's the way in which this lowers the bar that, oh, now we can imagine future presidents selling diplomatic documents for money. And we should worry about that and maybe legislate. That's just the weirdness of Trump. I mean, honestly, I don't think that Obama gets a lot of points for not revealing state secrets in his post presidency. Right. Like, we should assume that no one would ever do that, and we should still assume that. I, I don't think that maybe this is just a drive by, but I don't think Obama's post presidency has been a model in any way. Like, my post presidency models are John Quincy Adams and Jimmy Carter. Like, like public service is what, what I think a person should do after their presidency. And I don't. Obama has not done that.
- [33:29]
B
Maybe the question isn't national security secrets, which we all kind of assume and would hope that public officials take seriously and don't blab about once they're no longer public officials. But I guess, you know, you've written about Trump using NDAs in his business and in his personal life and also in the White House. And the fact that he would need to use them in the White House, I guess, would imply that there is information that people are privy to that isn't necessarily classified or secret, but that still is something that you could talk about. And obviously, it seems like Trump used NDAs, probably way too much. It seems like he's pretty NDA happy. But I guess one thing I've been wondering about is whether you think there was an element of, in the same way that former presidents burned their papers back when that was something that you could legally do, whether there's an element here of Trump taking these documents to save face. I mean, the kind of thing that you were worried about just us not being able to put together exactly what happened during his presidency because he took the documents that would fully tell that story.
- [34:34]
C
Right. And even if you think about the House investigation into the insurrection, the allegations that seem to me quite convincing, that Trump and his orbit of people intimidated witnesses to convince people not to speak or to not reveal certain things. Right. That that's analogous to the destruction of documents and the encouragement of other people to destroy documents. I think it also resonates with a kind of much broader campaign that we see across the country with these legislative battles over, like, what documents to teach in an American history class. Like, I don't. Maybe it was Kentucky, I think maybe it was Florida that made a list of the 25 primary documents that every kid must study. And it's like they're never the 25 documents that any historian would say every kid must study, like, as if the legislature gets to decide what happened in the past. And that's not the job of the legislature. The job of legislature is to decide what should happen in the future. But I think the ability, obsessive, fussy, and ultimately entirely impotent attempt to control the historical record of this country, not just of the Trump administration, but of the United States, is a feature of a really deep insecurity and pathology about the country that we actually live in now. It's really just not about the past. It's about the country that we live in now and the country that we want to have four years from now, ten years from now. This is a low point in the. In that story. I hope it is the bottom. And that's why an indictment, however much I feel personally it's necessary to mourn as a kind of loss of political stability, it is also something to be celebrated because it is an attempt to say, you cannot just get the past that you want. There is a past and it exists. And there are documents that will tell us, and there's evidence that can be gathered and can be investigated and interrogated and can be deliberated, and there are conclusions that can be drawn from it and will be drawn from it no matter what you do.
- [36:54]
B
Well, thank you so much.
- [36:56]
C
Thank you.
- [37:00]
B
Jill Lepore is a New Yorker staff writer and a professor of American history at Harvard University University. This has been the Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggit. The show is produced by Michelle Moses with editing help from Catherine Winter. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Our theme music is by Alison Layton Brown. Enjoy the rest of your week, and we'll see you next Wednesday.
- [37:33]
D
What the hell is going on right now, and why is it happening like this? At Wired, we're obsessed with getting to the bottom of those questions on a daily basis, and maybe you are, too. I'm Katie Drummond, the global editorial director of Wired, and I'm hosting our new podcast series, the Big Interview. Each week, I'll sit down with some of the most interesting, provocative, and influential people who are shaping our right now. Big Interview conversations are fun. I want a shark that. That eats the Internet, that turns it all off, unfiltered and unafraid. So in a lot of ways, I try to be an antidote to the unimaginable faucet of reactionary content that you see online. To the best of my ability, every week, we're going to offer you the ultimate luxury of our times, meaning and context. True or false. You, Brian Johnson, the man sitting across from me one day, at some point as of yet undefined in the future, you will die. False. Tell me more. Listen to the big interview right now in the same place you find WIRED's Uncanny Valley podcast. Subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts.
- [38:44]
C
From. PRX.