Obama In The Crosshairs: America First Legal Is Taking Action To Get Documents From Obama Foundation, Previous Administrations On National Archives Case

America First Legal, a conservative legal watchdog organization that “defends our citizens from unconstitutional executive overreach” and from “corporations that restrict free speech and violate our citizens’ civil rights”, submitted a FOIA request for documents and records relating to outgoing administrations from George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald J. Trump, according to Just the News.

America First Legal is in part asking the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) to supply them with “records sufficient to determine the date on which NARA first provided assignees or detailees to the Executive Office of the President to support the outgoing transition of presidential records” for each of those administrations. They also ask NARA to provide them with various materials concerning the Obama Foundation.

The letter America First sent wanted the disclosure of “[a]ll statutes and regulations relied upon by NARA for its authority to enter into a Letter of Intent (LOI) agreement with the Obama Foundation…All records reflecting the date at which the Obama Foundation’s Hoffman Estates facility became NARA-controlled Obama Presidential Center.”

This act by America First Legal came shortly after a letter by the legal team of former President Trump to Congress alleging in part that NARA provided irregular assistance to Trump’s transition team packing up operation to Mar-a-Lago. The letter noted that “NARA unfortunately has become overtly political and declined to provide archival assistance to President Trump’s transition team. Interestingly, in its Press Statement NARA cites every recent President after Jimmy Carter as having received the same assistance with “archival and security standards”.

As the letter, however, pointed out “President Carter, the last President before President Trump to not receive archival assistance found documents with classification markings in his home, which he returned to NARA (though apparently without an accompanying DOJ criminal probe).”

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“Whether NARA’s departure from routine pack-out procedures for President Trump was intentional or a product of the compressed timeline, it did not take custody of the documents and this made necessary the transfer of boxes of documents to President Trump’s heavily secured home at Mar-a-Lago,” the letter explained. “To be clear, had NARA offered President Trump the same assistance that it had provided to all previous Presidents, he would have accepted the offer and there would have been no reason to transfer the documents to Mar-a-Lago.”

“NARA’s variance from its standard procedures ignited a dispute with President Trump when it “discovered” that boxes were being transferred to Florida. In January 2022, in an attempt to cooperate with NARA, President Trump asked his staff to retrieve 15 boxes that had been moved to Mar-a-Lago so he could see what was in them before they were sent to NARA in Washington, DC,” the letter emphasized, adding, “However, due to other demands on his time, President Trump subsequently directed his staff to ship the boxes to NARA without any review by him or his staff.

“Upon receiving the boxes, NARA’s opened them, reviewed their contents, and found that some documents with classification markings had been mixed in with assorted other personal and Presidential records,” America First Legal revealed.

As noted previously by the DC Enquirer, the major politicos in the Republican House seem amenable toward intervening in the Trump-NARA dispute. America First Legal’s requests for their records of assistance toward Trump and other administrations would be helpful in determining the extent of the irregular assistance they allegedly displayed toward Trump.