Daily Mail59%
Trump's top White House enforcer Susie Wiles ordered to turn over secret records 54%
By Ross Ibbetson0%
5/21/2026, 12:17:52 PM
Topics: White House
Keywords: Dailymail, White House
BS Summary: This article contains 12 faulty reasoning types, including Availability Heuristic, Appeal to Authority, and Post Hoc (False Cause), with Biased Writer Voice as the most egregious example at 12.4% saturation with 81 hits. Analysis detected 479 faulty-reasoning hits from 651 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 52.8% and a BS Rank of 54% (9,308 of 20,134 articles). This article is worse (more manipulative) than 53.80% of the article peer group.
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Donald Trump's White House staff have been ordered by a federal judge to preserve presidential records, including text messages, after the administration tried to dismiss a Watergate-era transparency law as 'unconstitutional.'
US District Judge John Bates granted a preliminary injunction on Wednesday that requires White House staff to comply with the 1978 Presidential Records Act, enacted in the wake of the wire-tapping scandal that felled Richard Nixon.
The order applies to Trump's top enforcers, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and her deputy Stephen Miller, as well as the National Security Council, Council of Economic Advisers and officials working within the Executive Office of the President.
The decision comes after the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel last month claimed that the staff did not need to abide by the Records Act because it exceeds Congress' power and is therefore, unconstitutional.
Three watchdogs, the American Historical Association, American Oversight and the Freedom of the Press Foundation, sued the Justice Department and asked the judge to compel them to comply with the act.
They warned there was 'strong reason' to believe Trump would try to retain records when his term ends, citing the 15 boxes he kept after his first term, some marked classified, which sparked the FBI's 2022 Mar-a-Lago raid.
Bates opened his 54-page decision with a pointed literary flourish, quoting George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four: 'Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.'
The George W.
Bush appointee added that scrapping the act would rob Congress and future presidents of the ability to learn from history, echoing the inscription on the National Archives Building: 'What is past is prologue.'
Bates rejected DOJ's claim that the presidency's unique constitutional weight shields it from the act, writing that 'while the presidency is a singularly important institution, that gravity does not free it from modest constraint.
Quite the opposite.'
'Each branch of government derives its authority from the trust placed in it by the People, and Congress has validly determined that this Act helps to maintain that trust by shining some light on the activities of the President and his aides,' the judge wrote.
He noted that every president since Nixon, including Trump in his first term, had complied with the law 'without complaint' for nearly 50 years.
The absence of another Watergate-level scandal since Nixon 'suggests that the sunshine disinfectant of the Records Act is working as intended,' Bates added.
The judge took aim at the White House's new guidance on text messages, which tells staff to preserve only those that are the 'sole record' of official decision-making.
Under that rule, the judge warned, 'almost no texts would ever be preserved.'
Chioma Chukwu, executive director of American Oversight, called it 'an important victory for presidential accountability,' warning the administration had tried to replace decades of settled law with 'a system dependent largely on presidential discretion and public trust.'
The injunction takes effect at 9am on May 26.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson told the Daily Mail: 'President Trump is the most transparent and accessible President in history.
He is committed to preserving records from his historic time in office.
'The administration has made it crystal clear we will maintain a rigorous records retention program in order to properly preserve all materials related to: the performance of staff duties for historical value, the administrative record of policy decisions and actions, and litigation needs.
'The President will also keep the current program in place for electronic records – emails and documents cannot be deleted from the White House system.
This ruling fundamentally misunderstands the Administration’s position and we are confident that we will ultimately prevail.'
The Justice Department declined to comment.
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2speakers24%attributed speech498writer words
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14%flagged-word coverageAbigail Jackson
116 attributed words76% of attributed speech63% writer coverage
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