The documents are still at Mar-a-lago and we still need all of the Epstein files

“What a world, what a world,” cried the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz. We can utter that same cry every day, every day.

What kind of a world is it where a president and his minions work to undo all that makes America, America?

I’m talking threats to the Constitution, the 14th Amendment, the 19th Amendment, the Voting Rights Act, and one of my personal favorites, the Presidential Records Act.

Prior to Richard Nixon’s presidency, United States presidents were allowed to remove documents they created during their terms and claim them as personal property.

In 1934, the United States Congress established its first-ever national archives. Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the law for the National Archives to serve as a centralized, federal repository for the government’s documentary heritage.

Previously, federal records had literally been stashed “wherever” and depending on where the “wherever” was, rodents might have eaten documents or leaky roofs might have stained and blurred the writing. Mold could have set in and spread to unaffected documents. Yes, a National Archives was long overdue.

FDR also “believed presidential papers were an important part of the national heritage and should be preserved for future generations"¹ but that each president, rather than overwhelming the National Archives, should agree to establish their own presidential library but make the documents available for public use.

In 1938, FDR planned for the first-ever presidential library, where he would later deposit “50 million items, including 16,000 books, 15,000 photographs, 275,000 feet (84,000 m) of movie film, and 300 sound recordings.”²

FDR’s successors also built presidential libraries with private funds that were managed by what was then called the National Archives and Records Service (NARS).³ In 1955, Congress passed the Presidential Libraries Act allowing presidential documents and memorabilia to be transferred to the archives.

A little over a decade later Richard Nixon and Watergate happened. After Nixon left office in 1974, Congress decreed that Nixon’s papers (including White House recordings, of course) were to be seized and transferred to the National Archives.

In 1978, Congress passed the Presidential Records Act, which “changed the legal ownership of the official records of the President from private to public and established a new statutory structure under which Presidents, and subsequently NARA, must manage the records of their Administrations.”4

I have written about the current president’s disregard for this legislation before (in early March 2025). In case you’ve forgotten, 45/47 took a heap of boxes with him to Florida after his first term, claiming they were personal property, but they were not. They included classified information, which he showed to guests at Mar-a-Lago — people who had no security clearance to view such documents.

Some of those boxes have been returned to the government, but many still remain in unsecured areas at his Florida residence. Special Counsel Jack Smith investigated these documents and wrote a report, which remains under seal by Judge Aileen Cannon. Smith has testified twice, once in closed session and once in public, about this case.

After the president fired the National Archivist, Colleen Shogan in February 2025, the archivists at NARA were left to serve under Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Rubio was appointed as acting head of the National Archives, but he knew bupkis about the profession. His 300-day term recently expired, and NARA employees are left wondering what comes next.

What’s not likely to come next are the boxes from Mar-a-Lago. On April 1, (no fooling) the Department of Justice issued a memo — a memo that the Presidential Records Act was unconstitutional and that the president really doesn’t have to turn over his records when he leaves office after his second term.

The American Historical Association and American Oversight have both sued to dispute this opinion because it’s ridiculous. It’s a memo.

Historian Joanne Freeman states that the DOJ’s memo violates the separation of powers. “What we’re talking about is [a] public record that is OURS, and that is how we understand the history of presidencies.”

We can see what the endgame is, of course. 45/47 doesn’t want the public seeing these records. He doesn’t want us to know what he did in his first term, but as Freeman pointed out, destroying or hiding records “is not how noncorrupt regimes function.”

Indeed they do not. I follow all of this with great interest because it is my profession, sure, but how do we — you, me, all of us — know our history unless we have the facts? Yeah, right now, the facts of who we are sucks, but that’s why it’s even more important that we retain our documentary heritage, so that down the road we don’t lie and so that we don’t forget.

Saving the Nixon tapes helped topple a corrupt presidency. We need the boxes from Mar-a-Lago, and we need the rest of the Epstein files.

Joan Zwagerman would like people to understand that these documents are evidence and as such provide accountability. We should be clamoring for accountability.

1 https://www.fdrlibrary.org/dedication - from this website, I learned that George Washington intended to build a library containing his papers, but it never materialized. I also learned that Zachary Taylor’s papers were burned (not necessarily intentionally) by Union soldiers in 1862. Chester A. Arthur took matters into his own hands and burned three garbage cans’ worth of his documents the day before he died

2 Gunther, John (1950). Roosevelt in Retrospect. Harper & Brothers. pp. 99–100, 102–103

3 In 1985, NARS became the National Archives and Records Administration or NARA.

4 https://www.archives.gov/presidential-libraries/laws/1978-act.html