Trump sued over alleged plan to sell or destroy White House documents

President Donald Trump is being accused of planning on destroying or selling classified documents in a new lawsuit by an ethics watchdog.

“The Trump administration's attempt to upend a long-standing legal requirement to preserve presidential records must be ‘permanently’ blocked because there's ‘a real and immediate threat’ President Donald Trump will ‘destroy or sell’ documents, a new lawsuit alleges,” reported Law and Crime on Monday. The watchdogs in question include the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, and they name Trump, Vice President JD Vance, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, the National Archives (NARA) and acting Archivist Edward Forst as defendants. If they succeed in their plans, the plaintiffs allege, it will turn back the clock in America to a time when rampant corruption could occur unimpeded.

"President Nixon used his official authority to illegally target his perceived political foes and then to conceal and attempt to destroy evidence of that wrongdoing," the lawsuit claimed, saying that the Presidential Records Act (PRA) was passed after the Watergate scandal to protect the public interest, in the process “illegally defying the PRA.”

"Defendants have returned to a status quo rejected nearly a half century ago, where records of the President's and White House's official conduct are private property of the President that he can destroy or sell at will, even the most consequential official acts need not be documented, and the public and Congress will only ever see the documents that the President wishes to show them," the lawsuit alleged. "Defendants' unlawful actions pose a real and immediate threat that Presidential records will be irrevocably destroyed and forever lost to history."

Last month, a memo by Special Counsel Jack Smith — who investigated Trump’s seizure of classified documents at the end of his last term — revealed Trump seemed to have had a profit motive, planning on selling those documents from his Mar-a-Lago resort after leaving office. At the same time, Smith and his team later added “they could not prove this was his motive” and that he may have instead been driven by “an egotistical belief that he should be allowed to keep them,” especially classified documents he thought were “cool.”

"But after copious work by Smith’s team, the people said, prosecutors increasingly believed the most they could prove was that Trump erroneously believed he should be allowed to keep any record he wanted and some of the documents were simply 'cool,'" MS NOW's report said. "For example, investigators were surprised to learn Trump asked his briefers if he could keep the leather-bound covers of some of his classified briefings that carried the embossed title, 'The President,' according to one person familiar with the finding."