Missing Presidential Record Led to Obama's Office
A cherished letter to the former president should have been relinquished upon leaving the White House. It wasn't. Government archivists hunted it down.
FOIA documents showing a photograph of a Dec. 29, 2009 letter from Natoma Canfield to President Barack Obama after the National Archives retrieved it
This edition of FOIA Files is guaranteed to raise everyone’s blood pressure. Emails I recently received show that former President Barack Obama kept a letter after he left office that should have been turned over to the National Archives and Records Administration as required by the Presidential Records Act. It hasn’t been previously reported. This occurred just as NARA was beseeching former President Donald Trump to return a cache of records he improperly took from the White House when he left office. If you haven’t yet, sign up now to get FOIA Files every week.
There’s really no comparison between the single, unclassified letter from a cancer patient that Obama kept, and the 325 classified documents — 60 of them marked ‘top secret’ — found in dozens of boxes at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. Yet both instances cast a spotlight on the Presidential Records Act, an obscure Watergate-era law that has gained sudden prominence post-Trump, thrusting NARA into the unenviable position of chasing down former presidents in the name of archival integrity.