31st August 2022
Here is a lovely story about libraries and public policy.
The year is 1983.
The library is the British Library, formerly hosted in the reading room at the British Museum and other sites.
Nicolas Barker, then the library’s head of conservation, and Lord Dainton, then the chair of the British Library Board, had a problem.
Public finances were under pressure, and spending cuts were everywhere.
But.
They needed to work out a way to convince the then Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher about the urgent need for the move of the library to a new purpose-built building.
They decided to keep the issue simple: no lengthy paragraphs in a wordy report, still less charts or tables.
And certainly no waffly arguments.
They instead took her half a dozen books, as well as a novel by one of her favourite authors, which were falling apart, regardless of the care being taken to conserve them.
They placed the books on the table in front of Thatcher.
Silence.
She looked with horror at the state of the books.
Silence.
And then they then said:
‘Mrs Thatcher, we need a new building because all our books will fall to pieces if they stay where they are.’
So horrified was the Prime Minister at the potential fate of the national collection that they got the go-ahead for the new building.
*
There are perhaps two morals to this tale (which I have told before here and is recorded in this obituary).
One is that sometimes exhibits are more persuasive than words.
The other is never to underestimate archivists and librarians.
*
That there seems a real prospect of legal jeopardy for former President Donald Trump because of a breach of American archival law.
For many watching this is evocative of Al Capone being nailed on tax evasion charges.
Archival offences seem to Trump’s supporters a convenient pretext for legal action, rather than a substantive wrong.
But.
It is a substantive wrong.
For keeping documents and other information safe both for now and for posterity is a central function of the state.
It is how the government (and legislature and judiciary) of one day speaks to those charged with power in the future.
It is how those with power can be confident that certain information does not go to those who would use that information to cause damage and injury.
Like the integrity of the currency and protecting the realm, preservation of certain information is a core duty of those entrusted with power.
And like the damaged books put in Thatcher, visual evidence can be telling:
(Source.)
Of course, few of us know the facts.
It may well be that this legal exercise comes to nothing, and Trump escapes personal legal liability again.
And Trump is entitled to due process, like you and me.
But the wrongful removal of information from a government is not a trivial thing.
For without properly documented information, modern governments could not function.
That is why laws and policies about document management and retention are so important.
And there would be a wonderful irony if laws and policies about ensuring the integrity of written information were used to check the arch-abuser of political language and post-truth politics.
POSTSCRIPT
The historian Dr Adam Chapman has provided us with this similar story – click through to read more:
I enjoyed this. The Thatcher anecdote struck a chord, partly because the tactic was effective, but mostly because it's a variant of that employed by Sir Henry Cole. And his rat, National Archives E 163/24/31 – shared via @UkNatArchives Flickr stream:https://t.co/PSKN2IuuAu
— Adam Chapman (@DrAdamChapman) August 31, 2022
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Lovely anecdote that I will now shamelessly use as an illustration of how good campaigners should think and communicate, which isn’t always how policy advocates would approach an issue.
Wonderful anecdote!
A delicious irony that I take from the Trump story is his boast to be holding kompromat on Macron. From the man whose indiscretions are allegedly manifold.
As important as getting Trump into a courtroom, let’s hope his MAGA supporters understand the levels to which their hero stoops. I never thought patriotic Americans would turn a blind eye to treason. But I’m not sure. Trump has them mesmerised.
Well, as many have said, you can fool some of the people all of the time. Especially when being undeceived would require a serious psychological effort.
As a sort of underscore to the main post, here is a link to the government’s filing in the civil case brought by Mr Trump. UK readers may find it interesting as an example of US government (DoJ) work and readers of this post will find attached as exhibits (after the brief) two letters from the Archives explaining to Mr Trump’s lawyer why they will be turning previously recovered materials to the FBI. (NY Times link but I think it is not paywalled) https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/doj-response-to-trump-request-for-special-master/1b30feb331082a68/full.pdf
But they won’t see it as treason, rather as an endearing peccadillo, similar to Johnson’s charming mistake attending parties.
Unsurprisingly, US Press coverage of this story has been wall-to-wall since the news first broke, which makes it all the more surprising that one critical element of the fiasco remains unexplored by all the Talking Heads on US News.
Think for a moment of the US Government as an intelligence-gathering entity. There are 18 US Government departments that make up the so-called “Intelligence Community” (IC):
https://www.dni.gov/index.php/what-we-do/members-of-the-ic
Those agencies have what is, in effect, unlimited budgets for the gathering, analysis and dissemination of that intelligence. Think of that vast web of knowledge flowing towards the White House, where it is distilled in to a “Presidential Daily Brief” that may or may not have caught the eye of former President Trump. What I’m trying to describe here is that the White House itself must by virtue of its role in the US Federal Government be a collecting point for the most important materials handled by the state.
Yet based on some remarkably good reporting, we know that in January some 12 document boxes [see article image for an indication of size] containing classified materials were removed from Mar-A-Lago. In August another 15 boxes went the same way. We also know that there were yet more boxes in the “store” at Mar-A-Lago that the 4-person Team – a lawyer and 3 FBI agents – were not permitted to inspect or touch in any way. (So: the probability is high that there is yet more material on site that neither we nor the FBI know anything about).
Yet here’s the thing.
Do you honestly expect us to believe that the Federal Government, the largest intelligence-gathering community in the *world*, had nothing in place to control the potential *leak* of all that intelligence being gathered at the White House? No searches on exit? No shredders at the doors of meeting rooms to ensure that paper documents don’t leave? Most importantly of all, no attempt at implementing a chain-of-custody control over physical documents (i.e. mandating they be signed for and mandating the signatory takes personal liability for loss or misplacement).
Come on.
Like David, I think it’s going to be interesting to watch and see how Trump fares with the on-going investigation. He’s already floated several defense arguments, some of which, [“blanket declassification”] are frankly hilarious. Now he’s trying to argue that an FRCP 53, “Special Master” must review the documents collected by the FBI to determine whether he can claim any of them back.
It’s a smoke-screen, obviously. Trump has two goals in mind for such a move: 1. delay; 2. find out as much as he possibly can about the likely case the DOJ is building against him. The delay is relevant because if he can string them along to the point where he announces his candidacy for the 2024 presidential election, he can start to try and argue that any further investigation is prohibited under DOJ rules.
But back to the White House for a moment.
Where were the admin staff and what were they doing while 27 boxes of confidential documents grew legs and walked out the building? What were the report/document authors thinking when they didn’t get their documents back?
(This isn’t a secret), but every photocopier in the West Wing has technology built in to it that invisibly marks every produced copy with a reference label that identifies the copier used to make the replica and the date and time the copy was taken, as well as the ID of the user responsible. In the event a copied page “leaks” an investigator can ask for the paper and scan it to identify the originator.
The US government has been at this a while.
https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20200720-cia-spies-xerox-machine/
Despite all this, despite the threats of violence, the hysterical and pathetic “justifications” for the undisputed facts, despite the genuine risk to human intelligence sources that a leak may cause… nobody is yet asking, “How was this possible? How come controls were so lax that 27 boxes of such highly classified materials were able to walk out the door?
It would be fascinating to see if the White House CCTV captured the number of boxes leaving that location and compared it with what has been retrieved to date from Mar-A-Lago.
I doubt that USG/IC systems to prevent and mitigate ‘insider threats’, were designed for a situation where the ‘insider’ was the elected head of the executive branch.
I think you might be surprised.
Not because I think the IC or the US Secret Service spend time wondering if the latest elected President is a spy/mole/agent for a hostile government, but because we know how successive Presidents exert their will.
President Barak Obama, for example, refused to relinquish his personal Blackberry after being sworn in.
https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna28780205
That was a worrying time for the IC, until they got Blackberry to do more work on the security of the handset.
In other words, the USG/IC have to deal with the President being a significant security risk, regardless of who happens to hold the post at any given point in time. So I believe that there will always, always be a level of protection wrapped around them, one which is designed to cope with the President being an “unwitting” threat, if not an outright malicious one.
Having said all that, the point you make is entirely fair and the facts in support of your position are not disputed. For example, just this week, the DOJ filed a response to Trump’s attempt to have a “Special Master” appointed to review the materials retrieved by the FBI. In their filing,
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/22272789/doj-response-to-trump-special-master.pdf
the DOJ describes the numerous attempts they made to get Trump to hand over the improperly taken records, up to and including serving him with a Grand Jury subpoena, accepted through service on May 11th this year. By June 2nd, Trump’s counsel invited the FBI back to collect a “limited number of documents”, accompanied by a certification that all responsive documents had then been produced, following a “diligent search”.
On August 8th, the government returned to Mar-A-Lago, where they retrieved a *further* 33 boxes, with over 100 classified documents, some of which had been co-mingled with Trump’s personal property, including passports.
Given that backdrop, it would be completely irresponsible to assume that the former President was being either diligent or truthful.
To borrow a pertinent expression: brace, brace.
a not unrelated issue is the extent to which our government (or its members) and/or our elected representatives are using ephemeral forms of electronic messaging/communication with no proper record (indeed possibly no record at all) being kept of communications that take place. Holding people to account when things go wrong so often needs documentary evidence and it seems to me we are moving (or have moved), possibly deliberately, to the widespread use of systems where such evidence won’t exist.
Excellent, excellent point. Maybe we need a “Government Records Act” that requires the use of government technology for all official communications – complete with a serious deterrent offence for anyone found to be breaking the rules. We need the rules to be watertight – i.e. written so that no excuse is considered valid.
I don’t have access to anything remotely sensitive in my professional capacity, but even so, if I were to use a personal communications device for work-related business, that’s an *instantly* sackable offence, via Gross Misconduct. Every employee is required to take Code of Conduct training annually and this is always covered in detail. Our email network has leak prevention filters on it; I’m not permitted to send emails to e.g. gmail or hotmail domains; we have no access to USB devices; to get prints from printers we have to swipe our ID badges.
If my average, but very well run company can do this, I’m pretty sure a government can do a lot better.
No excuses.
If your “average, but very well run company” has successfully resolved the problem of using personal devices for business communications, you’ve done a far sight better than some investment banks.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-14/morgan-stanley-misuse-of-personal-devices-will-cost-200-million
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/07/18/bank-of-america-puts-aside-200-million-for-probe-into-bankers-use-of-personal-devices.html
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/12/17/jpmorgan-agrees-to-125-million-fine-for-letting-employees-use-whatsapp-to-evade-regulators.html
Thanks, DAG! :-) – I would like to call attention to a Wikipedia article regarding my compatriot the late Dr Endel Lippmaa. A quick Internet check yields the following: ((QUOTE SOURCE=”https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endel_Lippmaa”))Endel Lippmaa (15 September 1930 – 30 July 2015) was an Estonian academic, politician, founder and chairman of the Science Council of the National Institute of Chemical Physics and Biophysics best known for his work in uncovering crucial documents [indicating that] the Soviet annexation in 1940 of Estonia and the other Baltic states, Latvia and Lithuania was illegal.((/QUOTE)) Dr Lippmaa had been allowed temporarily out of the Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic to visit the USA, in connection with some science conference. He had used his time not just to attend his conference, but additionally to amass the documentary evidence cited in my Wikipedia quote. He had worked from American archive or library holdings. His investigation, and his conveying of its results to an appropriate Moscow deliberative forum (the State Duma, I rather think) helped in the overall task of dismantling the USSR. Had the Americans not kept their document collections in good shape, with the holdings readily accessible even to unexpected foreign researchers (even to researchers pressed for time, even to researchers not fully at ease in American society), he would have been unable to build his upcoming Moscow podium case. – So, archivists and librarians: be mindful of your importance; you cannot predict who may suddenly need to fill in a few of your handy photocopy-request forms.
DAG, you have a kindrerd spirit in Prof Heather “Don’t mess with archivists” Cox Richardson @HC_Richardson , my favourite US History and Policy blogger!
Another kindred spirit.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvneygfQ4iw
Incidentally, why didn’t the warrant give access to all areas?
Re the warrant: I’ve noticed in previous cases that I’ve followed that US warrants appear to be much more specific, inasmuch as they detail with precision what is allowed. [Not sure if this is the case here in the UK]
With this in mind, there’d have to be a detailed knowledge of the Florida estate.
This occurred to me in relation to the recent story of Giuliani having spent time at Trump’s invitation while he was recovering from a breakdown some years ago. In that report it was mentioned that Giuliani was able to meet up with Trump unnoticed as there was a tunnel connecting the bungalow where the ex Mayor of New York was staying with the future President’s quarters.
It then struck me that Mar a Lago is more akin to a smugglers’ den than most other properties, and this must have a certain appeal to a business man with a murky track record.
My first thought, on reading about tunnels at Mar-A-Lago, was, “No, surely not…”
https://uk.finance.yahoo.com/news/giuliani-used-tunnel-under-mar-173345978.html?guccounter=1
https://theweek.com/rudy-giuliani/1016163/mar-a-lago-has-underground-tunnels-new-book-on-giulianis-tragic-fall
Then I thought, crikey, I hope they’re just internal across the premises – and not something you could use to gain access to the property without being seen.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/trump-mar-a-lago-security-breach-arrest-tunnel-mark-lindblom-a8934366.html
But then, it’s not like anyone has actually been *caught* snooping around Mar-A-Lago, is it?
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-maralago-china-idUSKBN2082ER
You could not make this up…
The 4th Amendment requires that the items to be seized and the place to be searched be described with particularity. That requirement acts to limit the officer’s search by ensuring there’s some connection between what is being sought and where the officer is looking. If the officer is looking for a rifle, then he shouldn’t be rummaging through desk drawers. At least when the FBI and DOJ applied for the search warrant, the information they had indicated that documents were being stored in the storage room, Trump’s office, and another spot that I don’t recall. There was no reason to think that papers were stashed in the restaurant’s kitchen, for example, or in the several guest suites occupied by third parties. If there was no basis to believe that papers would be found in the kitchen, etc., no judge would have authorized a search of those areas. Thus, the warrant limited the areas that the FBI and DOJ could search.
I’m fairly confident that Al Capone’s lawyers didn’t spend all their time insisting their client couldn’t be charged with jaywalking, even after the execution of a search warrant listing tax fraud.
Perhaps a more serious crime revealed here is that against good taste – that carpet!
Ah! Martin – I’ve just scrolled through earlier comments and spotted that we both thought the same
Are there similarities in law between Trump & the members of our government that hide their business dealings behind the likes of WhatsApp on personal phones?
There has been no due process yet.
It would not be right to start quasi Orwellian chants of LOCK HIM UP at this stage.
I think the big, un-answered question, is why, with all his fabulous wealth, he chose that carpet.
Wealth =/= taste. All of Trump’s homes are famously hideous. Similarly, although he can presumably afford the services of a tailor, all of his suits fit him as would a large brown paper bag.
I could not agree more about the importance of archives and libraries, and proper record-keeping, not only of government records, but also of our cultural artefacts. I have been pestering for years about the importance of audio-visual material (particularly television) and it does now have an archive held by the BFI. But there are so many special events and programmes that have been lost because they are seen as ephemeral and unimportant at the time. These of course include records of governments, both national and local.