To God Be The Glory Plath’s Meats

Acts, Rules, and Documents

In your June 19 edition, a letters-tothe-editor writer inquired where columnist Stephen Tuttle got his information about the Presidential Records Act.

I am not speaking for Mr. Tuttle, but I got my information about the Presidential Records Act from one of the authors who wrote the declassification rules. Who better to explain what the act allows and does not?

In a June 9 column with CNN, Norm Eisen, who helped write Executive Order 13526 while he was President Obama’s special counsel for ethics and government reform, said that former President Trump argued that he could “automatically declassify documents” and did so with those he held at his Mar-A-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida. He also claimed he could declassify documents “even by thinking about it.”

Eisen said, “The problem for Trump is that EO 13526 is central to knocking down every variation of his defense that his retention of the documents was somehow authorized. It sets up a declassification process that applies to everyone—even the president—and it says nothing about automatic presidential declassification.”

Eisen also notes that the statute “nowhere stretches the definition of personal documents to encompass our nation’s most sensitive secrets. On the contrary, personal documents are defined as ‘purely private’ ones which ‘do not relate to or have an effect upon the carrying out of the … duties of the President.’”

I hope the writer of the letter doubting Mr. Tuttle’s sources because they are different from her news sources reads the act to learn what it really says about the proper handling of our nation’s most sensitive documents.