This article by By John Langford, Justin Florence, Erica Newland is published by Lawfareblog. Here is an excerpt:

On Jan. 31 and Feb. 5, The Washington Post reported that former President Trump routinely “tore up briefings and schedules, articles and letters, memos both sensitive and mundane” in violation of the Presidential Records Act (PRA) and that some of the records received by the Jan. 6 committee had been “ripped up and then taped back together.” As the Washington Post pointed out, the fact that Trump ripped records wasn’t news. In 2018, Politico ran a profile on the two staffers tasked with Scotch taping Trump’s records back together. But the recent reporting suggests that Trump shredded far more documents than previously known, and that many of the shredded records ended up in “burn bags” and destroyed. That includes records of particular importance to the Jan. 6 committee’s ongoing investigation related to Trump’s efforts to pressure Vice President Pence to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Additional details of Trump’s removal and destruction of records are being revealed daily. On Feb. 7, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) disclosed that it had been forced to retrieve 15 boxes of records from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence. On Feb. 9, The New York Times reported that some of those boxes contained classified records. On Feb. 10, a preview of Maggie Haberman’s book disclosed that “staff in the White House residence periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet—and believed the president had flushed pieces of paper.”

As in various other situations in which Trump has flouted well-established laws and norms that typically constrain the president, his apparent brazen disregard of the PRA presents two sets of questions: First, what are available mechanisms for accountability against a president who violates these rules? And second, what future reforms would strengthen guardrails against rule of law violations by the occupant of the Oval Office? After a short primer on the PRA’s origins and how it operates, we discuss both sets of questions below.   

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