Happening in 20 min! https://twitter.com/databrarian/status/1352030823722135552

After an intro from @meg_phillips7, Laurence Brewer (Chief Records Officer of NARA) opens with an explainer on the Federal Records Act, then Gary Stern (General Counsel of NARA) does the same with the Presidential Records Act.

Gary explains
-how Watergate prompted the PRA, as well as why there isn't one for Congress or the Supreme Court.
-that while in office the president has virtually all authority on how to deal with their records, but once they leave office, it automatically transfers to NARA.

However, having legal custody is not the same as having physical custody, and that acquisition presents some challenges, especially in the digital age.

Gary goes into some history about when emails first became considered official records. Now, records can be in any format, as long as the content is considered a record. So yes, all of the @/realdonaldtrump are (supposed to be) collected as records.

Getting more into specifics -- Meg asks Laurence what we are doing to prepare fed agencies for new leadership.

Laurence -- it's been very busy! Working with staff professionals within agencies, updating guidance that reminds them of their responsibilities under the FRA

-and ensuring that anyone departing or coming on board during the transition are in compliance through debriefs as they leave or are made aware as they come in. Lots of guides online.

Plug for Records Express -- https://records-express.blogs.archives.gov/ 

This year the Archivist of the US wrote a memo to all agency heads covering 4 areas -- email mgmt, entrance & exiting of officials, web records, and use of things like encrypted messaging apps

Q: Can records be destroyed for political purposes?
Answer-- There is someone assigned as a point of contact for every fed agency, working with a records officer who reports to the SAORM. They are career officials, they aren't political appointees.

(cont) There have been cases in which a SAORM is directed to not comply, and in those cases they can contact NARA.

Q: So if someone does hear about a case where a fed record has been destroyed inappropriately, what can they do about it?

A: There are processes internally, and for the public there is a website where anyone who has been made aware of an allegation can report it.

(con't) There are specific timeframes by which an agency must respond to an allegation of an unauthorized disposition.

Unauthorized Disposition
: https://www.archives.gov/records-mgmt/resources/unauthorizeddispositionoffederalrecords

Question for Gary - How did NARA work with the Trump administration on the preservation of records?


NARA provides guidance to the WH, and much of it is automated.

Primarily dealt with Trump admin counsel and IT staff. Gary says they were cooperative.

For some sense of how scale has changed:
Clinton admin: 20 mil emails
Bush admin: 220 mil emails, 90 TB
Obama admin: 300 mil emails, 250 TB data
For Trump admin, a single term, they are expecting a possible 500 TB of data

Social media somewhat more complicated because it's third party. Usually, NARA takes over the passwords to do so, but the Trump admin lost control of the passwords due to the Twitter ban so it's... complicated.

Getting to the Q&A -- much of these topics were covered in panel discussion

Further details on the social media accts used by WH officials -- it's not who controls the acct, it's the content of the acct. If it relates to their official duties, it's a gov't record-

- regardless of which acct they are using. For Trump, he decided to use his personal acct, and in NARA's view, they belong to NARA bc of the content. Getting access is complicated bc Trump is the owner of that acct.

See https://www.trumplibrary.gov/  for archived social media, the Trump admin website, etc.

The @potus45 account is owned by NARA.

Q: did NARA have a liaison in the Trump office and will they in the Biden admin?
A: no, never have had a formal NARA liaison *in* the WH. There is the office of the Presidential Diarist, which is a NARA employee on detail to the WH.

Q: are presidential records already redacted when they come to the archive?
A: they are not. NARA gets them in full and complete form, as much as possible, and their staff do the review and redaction when necessary. For pres records, there's a lot and it takes time.

It's a slow and tedious process that requires humans to review, and unfortunately that does often create quite the backlog.

Q: Can you speak more to the automation of the process? When you say they are “automatically transferred to NARA,” what does that mean, exactly?

The PRA acts to change the *legal status* automatically; there's no automated pipeline to physically (or digitally) transfer records.

Lots of transfers to servers, which are then loaded onto trucks, etc, historically, but now much being transferred cloud-to-cloud.

Q: Can you speak to any holes in the Trump admin's records? Should we be concerned about significant gaps? Has there been evidence of noncompliance?

A: There has been a fair amount of allegations and litigation against agencies & trump admin, and courts have ruled on these

With the PRA, it's harder to actually sue and those allegations haven't been addressed by the courts.

NARA receives what the presidential admin sends them. They don't know what they don't know. For digital records like emails, some of them are auto-archived.

To delete an email, it would require a lot of people and effort involving the data centers, etc, so it's not that it couldn't be done, but it would be difficult to do intentionally with no one knowing about it.

During Bush admin, there were 5mil (? I think I heard that right) emails that were deleted, but that was an IT glitch.

Trump did tear up records and throw them in the trash, but it does appear that "they" (who?) took those bins and taped them back together

Other questions that were remaining at the end of the hour (so much to cover!!)

Q: Does NARA work with executive branch agency heads on the disposition of their personal files or is that handled by the agency records managers? Does NARA provide courtesy storage of materials that belong to political appointees?

A: No courtesy storage, but does provide guidance. Does rely on agencies for this. There are inspections -- often it's an issue of unintentional mistakes or lack of staffing or resources to do what they need to do.

Need political appointees, heads of agencies to manage their records like anyone else, and part of that is making sure they understand what exactly is a record vs personal.

Q: Are White House records part of presidential records or governed by the FRA?

A: Many WH records are not *presidential* so those would be covered by FRA.

Q: A problem for historians, journalists, and other members of the public concerned about the failure to create records (as we saw for example with messaging aps and the failure to create records on meetings with heads of state) is discovery beyond media reports. -

-Can members of the public gain access to the complaints filed with the Inspector General so as to have a better understanding of failure to create and efforts to destroy records before it is too late (eg end of presidential term) to do anything about it?

A: It's a real issue -- both the FRA & PRA create an obligation to adequately document, but what that means and how to actualy make people create recrds, i.e. take notes at meetings, it's never been clear how to force someone to do that.

If they dont create a record then it doesn't exist. People also have gotten less formal about things like meeting minutes notes. On the other hand, there are 300mil emails from the Obama admin, for example, and just about anythign that happens in a meeting ends up in an -

email somewhere -- so it's probably there, just harder to find.

re: inspector generals -- Laurence suggests FOIA. They are fed employees and would be governed by the same processes.

Q: I do research at the Reagan Library and have had some conversations with the archivists about records processing. They indicated that, since the PRA, the processing of (paper) records occurs piecemeal and ad hoc, because it depends on allocations of funds from Congress.

They contrast that with the old presidential library model, before the PRA, where private money was raised to process the archives and thus the entire collection could be processed more wholesale. Could you speak a bit more about the schedule for processing archives -

under the PRA, and are we as researchers really beholden to Congress deciding when and whether to allocate funds for processing the collection?

A: no public access for the first 5 years, and they get such an avalanche of requests as soon as things get requests, that there's no time to do other kinds of processing. In older libraries, FOIA did not apply and they could pick and choose what to release and at what times-

- systematically rather than having to spend time fulfilling each request piecemeal. It's ultimately a question of resources -- how many ppl are available to review the volume of requests, and they are beholden to congress and the admin for staffing, budget, etc.

Q: in the case of a bad actor, is there any recourse?
A: It can be a criminal offense. Once they leave office, if they take records with them, DOJ can get involved if records have been improperly removed from govt. Usually once approached those records are returned.

If they're refusing to create records, not much to do about that...

It's completely undefined so there's no real way to absolutely mandate this.

Other questions remaining (I think) (putting these here in case @meg_phillips7 or someone else can address them)

From @freegovinfo: Can you talk about the proposed rule re digitization of records, how it differs from and updates current practice, and how will the new rule impact public access and preservation?

Last Q: As an archivist I find the process of appraisal (in records management and archival management) the most complicated and contentious responsibility of records managers and archivists. As an example I'm thinking of the 2018-2019 issue of the proposed, revised, re-proposed-

- records retention schedule of the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), Detainee Records. Can NARA make the appraisal process more transparent and open to public input? Can records deemed not worthy of being kept be made available to other-

- repositories who want those records (deem them of having permanent value) and will take on the responsibility of stewardship?

Thanks to @The_OAH and @USNatArchives for this informative panel!