Seeking to deflect consideration from studies that the categorized paperwork he had saved in his Florida house would possibly have contained fabrics associated with nuclear guns, former President Donald J. Trump claimed on Friday that his predecessor, Barack Obama, had completed the similar factor.
“President Barack Hussein Obama kept 33 million pages of documents, much of them classified,” Mr. Trump stated in a commentary. “How many of them pertained to nuclear? Word is, lots!”
But the National Archives and Records Administration, or NARA, which preserves and maintains data after a president leaves place of business, showed on Friday afternoon that Mr. Obama had became over his paperwork — categorized and unclassified — as required underneath the Presidential Records Act of 1978.
The National Archives “assumed exclusive legal and physical custody of Obama presidential records when President Barack Obama left office in 2017, in accordance with the Presidential Records Act,” the commentary stated. “NARA moved approximately 30 million pages of unclassified records to a NARA facility in the Chicago area, where they are maintained exclusively by NARA. Additionally, NARA maintains the classified Obama presidential records in a NARA facility in the Washington, D.C., area.”
“As required by the P.R.A.,” the commentary added, regarding the Presidential Records Act, “former President Obama has no control over where and how NARA stores the presidential records of his administration.”
A spokesman for Mr. Trump didn’t instantly reply to a request for remark.
In 2017, the National Archives introduced that the Obama presidential data have been in its ownership and that it will maintain them in an archival facility fairly than in a standard presidential library. It stated it will digitize all unclassified data the usage of investment from the Obama Foundation. “Classified records will be stored in the Washington, D.C., area, where they can more efficiently and effectively be secured and reviewed for declassification,” the announcement stated. “As classified records are declassified and released, NARA will make them available in digitized form.”
The National Archives and the Obama Foundation equipped standing updates at the digitization of the data in a 2018 letter and a 2019 memorandum of figuring out.
