The Trump Presidential Library recently told The Washington Post that it possessed “no records” of Donald Trump’s first-term Twitter direct messages. The response to the Post’s Freedom of Information Act request was, at best, a bureaucratic failure.
We know that because on the same day it told the Post it had no documents, the library sent my organization, Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF), a contradictory response confirming that it does hold those records. (As a reminder, the Trump library is the official National Archives and Records Administration website for processing FOIA requests, not to be confused with the shrine Trump is building in Miami.)
The discrepancy is alarming for a few reasons.
First, we already know these records exist. The Post’s Nate Jones notes that court filings from Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the Jan. 6 riot revealed that Trump’s account sent or received at least 32 direct messages between Oct. 20, 2020, and Jan. 21, 2021.
Second, under the Presidential Records Act, the president’s digital communications concerning government business are public property that must be preserved and transferred to the National Archives. This explicitly includes social media messages, and NARA’s own guidance leaves zero room for ambiguity on this requirement.
It is possible that minor semantic discrepancies between the requests — the Post requested records “related to” the DMs, while I requested DMs “sent to or from” the account — prompted overly cautious agency personnel to nitpick and deny the Post’s request.
But that feels like a generous excuse, considering Trump’s attempts to claw back his records from public scrutiny.
The specter that Trump’s social media messages aren’t being preserved is further worrisome, considering his ongoing use of social media to communicate with cabinet officials. In October 2025, Trump, apparently inadvertently, publicly posted a message on Truth Social that was meant for former Attorney General Pam Bondi, expressing his frustration that she had not prosecuted his political enemies quickly enough.
To determine how widely Trump is running the government using his Truth Social account this term, FPF filed FOIA requests to all cabinet officials with active Truth Social accounts, seeking copies of their DMs, including messages to or from the president.
To date, we’ve been almost completely stonewalled. The only agency that has responded to our request is the Department of Homeland Security, which dubiously claimed to have no records from former Secretary Kristi Noem’s Truth Social account, including DMs from Trump.
It’s most likely that the DM disappearing act is the predictable outcome of the administration’s broader assault on public access to its records, and raises uncomfortable questions about NARA’s ability to remain impartial, much less effective, at releasing Trump’s records under its new leadership.
The agency is currently run by acting archivist Edward Forst, a Trump political appointee and former Goldman Sachs executive with zero background in archival history, and it’s unclear if or how he can help the agency improve its decades-long wait times for records requests.
The problems at NARA are amplified by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel’s radical new opinion, authored by Assistant Attorney General T. Elliott Gaiser, declaring the Presidential Records Act unconstitutional. The White House immediately followed this up with guidance that loosened record-retention mandates for staff, specifically around text messages.
This threatens public access to the most important records created in government, not only for Trump’s records — but for every future presidential administration, Democrat or Republican.
That’s why FPF, represented by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, sued over the White House’s dangerous records policy. On May 20, we secured a major victory when U.S. District Judge John Bates issued a preliminary injunction explicitly warning that treating public history as private property “defies the very words engraved on the National Archives Building.” He ordered White House officials to immediately halt their nonpreservation policies and preserve their electronic communications.
Yet, the Trump Library response to the Post suggests that while the courts have ordered compliance with the PRA, public access remains in jeopardy.
Whether the discrepancy in response to the Post and FPF is due to the library’s word games over verbiage, a bureaucratic error, or a direct symptom of Trump’s core belief that public records belong to him, remains to be seen.
But we will have to wait at least six months to find out. When I followed up with library staff to check the status of my request for Trump’s DMs, archivists told me my request was 36th in line, with an estimated completion date of November.
