Here is another thing I was wondering about that recently came to light.

Why was Obama allowed to move all of his Presidential Records to a warehouse in Chicago?

So like many, I have done my own research on the Chicago Warehouse that the National Archives claim they are keeping all of the Obama Presidential records. According to all of the Archive websites and location listings, there is only one facility in Chicago and it has something to do with historical railroads.

Yet, when people questioned the idea of Obama moving everything to a storage warehouse in Chicago, the National Archives were quick to demand that the actual warehouse and documents within were theirs. Turns out that this is only a half truth and not the whole truth. Apparently they have what is referred to as a "technical possession" of the documents.

From what I have been able to gather, the Archives have the ability to work with an outgoing President to take "technical possession" of documents that are physically stored at a location of the former President's choosing. By all accounts this has been basically standard procedure. In Obama's case, he chose to move his documents to a warehouse in Chicago (which according to all research is under his name). But based on the agreement, the Archives have a "technical possession" which according to the laws of the Presidential record act would still be a shared possession.

So what does that mean? According to the Presidential Records Act only the outgoing President is supposed to have access to the records for a particular amount of time (five years according to the law). In fact, according to the law, the outgoing President is the only person who should have access. After that five years elapses, the National Archives are supposed to work to sort through, organize, digitalize and do whatever else needs to be done to make all records public records. This is largely why the |Archives had not done any work on the Obama documents when the whole Trump fiasco was in full swing. It was still within the five year time frame.

Obviously the Trump team and the National Archives were unable to come to the same sort of agreement with the Trump Presidential records. I am not sure which side is 100% to blame about this, but it seems clear that such an agreement could have been reached. Obviously there is no legal difference between a third party storage facility in Chicago and a private storage facility in Mar-a-Lago. In fact give the letter of the Presidential Records act, the latter makes more sense than the former.

I see no reason why Trump would not have agreed to the "technical possession" given the laws allowing him sole access for five years. Nope. The evidence points to the National Archives as undercutting any agreement and instead requesting (or dare we say demanding) physical custody of the records. Something the law states they do not required to do within the first five years. Was this concept pushed by partisan anti-Trumpers in the National Archives or was the concept pushed on the National Archives by other anti-Trump players higher up in the deep state? Either way, it is just one more example of how people in the Government treated Trump like he was not a real President worthy of the same considerations of other Presidents.

Bottom line: As is so often the case, it seems like this was less about how Trump acted differently than other Presidents and more about how he was treated differently than other Presidents.