President Donald Trump attends a joint news conference with Ukraine”s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy following a meeting at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, Sunday, Dec. 28, 2025, in Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon).
Days after a Department of Justice memo claimed the “dictates” of a federal records preservation law passed by Congress in the aftermath of Watergate no longer applied to President Donald Trump, a YouTuber with millions of subscribers told a judge that a “preservation order is desperately needed.”
National security lawyer Kel McClanahan filed a letter Monday on behalf of LegalEagle — the YouTube account of attorney and legal commentator Devin Stone — asking U.S. District Judge Theodore Chuang to agree that the DOJ Office of Legal Counsel’s (OLC) opinion from April 1 “shattered” the “presumption of regularity” on the part of the government by declaring that the Presidential Records Act (PRA) unconstitutionally made the president’s personal records the property of the United States.
The PRA was enacted in 1978, four years after Richard Nixon lost the Watergate tapes case and resigned in disgrace. The legislation gave the United States “complete ownership, possession, and control” over presidential records, requiring that the chief executive “adequately” document “activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of the President’s constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties” for their submission to the National Archives (NARA).
As Law&Crime reported two weeks ago, Assistant Attorney General T. Elliot Gaiser caused a stir by writing that the law Trump once cited in vain to justify taking classified documents out of the White House to Mar-a-Lago after his first term was “invalid in its entirety.”
It prompted one of the groups separately suing over Volume II of former special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation to call the power move a “permission slip” to hide “corruption.” A lawsuit to force Acting Archivist Ed Forst to comply with the PRA followed.
LegalEagle’s Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) case was filed in March, but a Monday letter told Chuang the stakes have only gotten higher.
“[A] significant portion of the records responsive to the FOIA request at issue in this case—if not all of the responsive records—have been ‘returned’ to President Trump’s Mar-a-Lago Club, but we maintain that, as presidential records, they continue to be in Defendant’s legal custody. However, while I have attempted to reach an agreement with Defendant’s counsel in which they would commit to preservation of these records, they will only commit to preserving records in the agency’s custody, without agreeing that the records currently at the Mar-a-Lago Club are in the agency’s custody,” the letter said of NARA. “In fact, they refuse to even admit or deny the allegations that the records were transferred to the Mar-a-Lago Club in the first place, calling those paragraphs ‘irrelevant’ in their Answer.”
The letter submitted that “a preservation order is desperately needed” and on an “expedited” basis, so the plaintiff is “not irreparably harmed by the destruction of responsive records.”
“Through this OLC opinion, DOJ has officially informed President Trump and his staff that, as far as DOJ is concerned, they are free to destroy any and all presidential records at will—including the records responsive to Plaintiffs’ request—with no fear of any consequences,” the filing concluded. “While Defendant’s commitment to preserving all responsive records ‘in its custody’ would normally suffice, its refusal to agree that the records at the Mar-a-Lago Club are in its custody, coupled with this new OLC opinion, demonstrates that a preservation order is desperately needed in order to ensure that Plaintiffs are not irreparably harmed by the destruction of responsive records.”
Chuang, a Barack Obama appointee sitting in Maryland, is also presiding over the classified documents prosecution of Trump’s former national security adviser John Bolton.
Reached for comment, McClanahan told Law&Crime that he’s brought four different cases against the administration over matters including the alleged “attempt to censor” Bolton’s tell-all book and the preservation of Mar-a-Lago records for evidentiary and legal-historical purposes.
“Even if Trump had not been reelected, these would be critically important pieces of evidence as the country tries to resolve and recover from the chaos of that administration, but with Trump back in the Oval, it’s even more important to understand all the ways he and his abused their authority the first time around (or, in the case of the Mar-a-Lago records, after he left office) so we can try to mitigate the damage this time,” he said.
Read the letter here.
