Friends of the PRA

This week, 106 members of Congress, 25 former senior national security officials, and seven former senior officials from the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) filed amicus briefs backing us in our fight to stop the Trump administration from evading the Presidential Records Act (PRA).

That means that some of the people best positioned to assess the PRA — the lawmakers who wrote the law, the national security officials who relied on it, and the people who managed presidential records — all weighed in to say the Trump administration’s argument that the law is unconstitutional has no merit.

We’ve been fighting to protect the PRA against the Trump administration’s attempts to undermine it since April, when the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel claimed the law is unconstitutional and that President Donald Trump doesn’t need to comply — putting millions of records at immediate risk. In May, a district court ordered Trump administration officials to comply with the PRA while our lawsuit proceeds. The administration appealed that order using the same argument that the district court already rejected: that the PRA is facially unconstitutional in its entirety. Earlier this month, we urged the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit to reject the administration’s latest attempt to evade the law and to instead affirm the district court’s order requiring administration officials to comply with the law while litigation proceeds.

That brings us to this week’s amicus briefs, which explain why the administration’s argument against the PRA doesn’t hold up.  

The brief filed by more than 100 members of Congress — including House minority leadership and senior members of committees with jurisdiction over records preservation — says that the administration’s argument and appeal largely ignore the legislative record backing the PRA, which was deliberately built to balance public access against presidential prerogatives.

More than a half dozen former NARA officials, who have served in presidential administrations under both major political parties, filed a brief explaining that NARA handles the bulk of the work of preserving records, so complying with the PRA is a largely routine, IT-driven process. The brief notes that no prior president — including Trump during his first term — ever suggested the PRA was unconstitutional or unduly burdensome.

Former top national security officials who also served across Republican and Democratic administrations — including former CIA Directors John Brennan and General Michael Hayden, former National Security Advisor Susan Rice, and former Directors of National Intelligence James Clapper and Avril Haines —  filed a brief arguing that the PRA actually protects a sitting president’s power by ensuring they can access their predecessors’ national security records. Otherwise, an outgoing president could withhold records from successors, leaving the United States “disadvantaged on the world stage” and vulnerable to foreign governments misrepresenting past commitments.

“The American people must retain ownership over the historical record of the presidency,” our Executive Director Chioma Chukwu said. “Our democracy depends on it.”

Justice Department should investigate RFK Jr.’s statements about trip to Samoa

On Thursday, we sent the Justice Department a letter urging it to open a criminal investigation into Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.’s apparently false statements to two U.S. Senate committees about the purpose of his 2019 trip to Samoa. 

Our request points to a newly released Jan. 20, 2019 letter in which Kennedy personally proposed that his former organization, Children’s Health Defense, travel to Samoa to conduct an examination of “what happened with your MMR vaccines.” The letter directly contradicts Kennedy’s statements during his January 2025 confirmation hearings that the trip had nothing to do with vaccines. 

This trip has been under scrutiny for years. Kennedy visited Samoa after the deaths of two infants who received an improperly prepared MMR vaccine prompted a 10-month nationwide halt to vaccinations and a sharp drop in immunization rates. Months after Kennedy’s visit, a measles outbreak swept through Samoa, sickening thousands and killing 83 people, most of them children under five. Public health officials have said the outbreak was worsened by anti-vaccine activism that Kennedy’s visit helped legitimize. 

“Congress relies on truthful testimony to do its job, particularly on matters as consequential as public health,” our Executive Director Chioma Chukwu said. “If Kennedy lied to the Senate while seeking confirmation as the nation’s top health official, the Justice Department must investigate and hold him accountable.”

American Oversight in the news

• Senator calls for criminal investigation of RFK Jr after Guardian report (Guardian)
• Former US archivists warn that Trump’s effort to ignore records law jeopardizes national security and government continuity (CNN)
• The Trump administration says it’s investigating these Colorado institutions. Here’s what’s really happening. (Denver Post)
• Trump’s latest attempts to rewrite the Constitution and expand executive privilege (Justice Matters podcast)
• Colorado hospital says it’s owed $4M for ICE detainee care after 10-month payment freeze (Becker’s Hospital Review)

Other stories we’re following

• ICE arrests soar as people with no criminal record are increasingly targeted (New York Times)
• States renew fight against Trump’s mail-in voting rule (Axios)
• The county prosecutors who became ICE informants (Wired)
• Fighting measles is expensive. See what it cost to contain 10 cases. (Washington Post)