One of the strange byproducts of having a former president who not only engaged in, but actually celebrated his rampant criminality is that suddenly the general public becomes extremely aware of a whole suite of otherwise relatively obscure laws and statutes. Outside of professionals and legal wonks, you’d likely have been hard-pressed to find anyone who knew about things like the Hatch Act — much less cared about it — before Donald Trump and his cronies flouted that law with such gleeful abandon that people couldn’t help but take notice.
So too has it been with the Presidential Records Act, the 1978 law that regulates where and how all of a former president’s documents are kept, and by whom. The act, created by Congress to prevent former President Richard Nixon from obscuring his role in the Watergate scandal, essentially mandates that presidents and vice presidents keep all their official documents until their term in office is over, at which point those records belong to the government, by way of the National Archive.
