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NEW: The Justice Department has quietly assured President Donald Trump's lawyers that any presidential records left behind on hard drives in the White House will not become the property of the Biden administration. by @rbravender & me ($) @Politicsinsider http://ow.ly/7PBK50DbS5L
Instead, the US archivist and not Joe Biden will be in control of any electronic records that remain on hardware inside the Executive Office of the President after the new president's inauguration, per an opinion issued Friday by Deputy Assistant Attorney General Devin DeBacker.
The 6-page DOJ memo issued during the closing days of the Trump administration comes during one of the most tumultuous presidential transitions in US history and as Trump still refuses to concede that Biden fairly won the election.
Its late arrival is also troubling to some legal experts who see the DOJ-approved language as an attempt to further hamstring Biden's access to important information about the last administration.
Neil Eggleston, who served as WH counsel to Obama during the 2017 transition to the Trump administration, told Insider that the request for the memo likely reflected a "lack of competence" by Trump's team when it came to sending records "in a timely fashion to the archivist."
Eggleston said he is worried that Trump's lawyers will use the opinion "to claim an overly broad exclusion from the right of the Biden administration to access documents critical for the continuity of government," he told Insider on Monday.
The new opinion on presidential recordkeeping came out of the Office of Legal Counsel, a critical branch of DOJ that is frequently asked to weigh in on the legality of decisions from the president, the White House and also other executive agencies.
OLC during the Trump administration has published many opinions favorable to the president and against the wishes of Democrats trying to exert oversight of the controversial administration.
That includes memos that rejected the validity of 2019 House impeachment effort, plus opinions used to thwart Democrats from seeing key sections of the final Mueller report, obtaining testimony from top WH officials and also to review the president's tax returns via subpoena.
The opinion is addressed to an unnamed Trump deputy counsel at the White House and responds to questions asked of the Justice Department about who takes charge of the lame duck president's hard drives.
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