A secret Obama-era executive action may have authorized former President Donald Trump to keep presidential records at Mar-a-Lago. My organization, America First Legal, filed a Freedom of Information Act request last week to find out.
In October 2014, Russian hackers breached the Executive Office of the President’s (EOP) network. Months later, President Barack Obama created, via executive action, the Presidential Information Technology Committee (PITC), purportedly to protect EOP information by moving systems onto Department of Defense (DOD) servers.
The PITC executive order and documents obtained from litigation reveal how President Obama asserted an aggressive position on presidential control over information. Under PITC, if the president accessed data, it was presumptively his. America First Legal has argued this aggressive position is constitutional.
Given no public evidence that the PITC order was rescinded, Obama’s position has legal consequences for former President Trump and his various indictments concerning records originating from the government. First, PITC creates a presumption that the president controls virtually all of the data he receives. The PITC memo established the president’s “exclusive control” over information resources and systems provided to him. The memo created the presumption that information contained on information systems and resources was “EOP information.” Because the memo relied upon the Federal Records Act’s definition of “information system” as resources organized for the “use” and “disposition” of “information,” the memo purports to give the president exclusive control over the information he receives.
That’s why America First Legal is investigating PITC — to determine whether DOD actually retains copies
