weeks ago saying, well, actually a lot of those cases were people who died with covid but not from covid. but this is typical of -- of how the numbers in this pandemic are -- you know, often just totally bogus. maybe it's not intentional because the government doesn't get accurate data for a lot of things. there are so many fundamental questions we could have had better information on. as far as the health data, a number of foreign nations like britain and israel have much better health data as far as the exposure. and something which the media here doesn't report is that a number of states in the u.s., you've had more covid fatalities among the fully vaxed in the last month or two, three months, then among the unvaxed. but you've got biden out there saying it's a pandemic of the unvaxed. this is complete bs. >> james bovard, opinion

columnist with "usa today," follow him at twitter on usatoday.com. thanks for the conversation, sir. >> thanks for having me on. >> lee white is the executive director of the national coalition for history, here to talk about the presidential records act. lee white, first of all, the national coalition for history, what is the group, what's your mission? >> we're a nonprofit, nonpartisan consortium of about 40 different groups that represent historians, archivists, researchers, teachers, students, political scientists, genealogists, the largest users of archives. we're a nonpartisan group that advocates on behalf of those different organizations. we're a nonprofit made up of nonprofits, basically. >> and what are you advocating for? >> well, obviously one of the things we advocate for is more funding for agencies like the

national archives and the national endowment for the humanities. but another part of our mission is obviously what we're talking about today. preservation of records, access to records, preservation of records, declassification, issues like that, so this goes, what we're talking about this morning goes to the core of our mission. >> and what we're talking about is the presidential records act of 1968, let me read for our viewers, changed legal ownership of the official records of the president from private to public, established new statutory structure under which the presidents and nara must manage the records of their administrations, the national records archive administration, that is, so how did this come about and why. >> well the genesis of it was president nixon, as we all know, he had the tapes and other materials related to watergate.

congress was afraid, if they, well, let me backtrack one step. before the presidential records of act of 1978 passed the records of the president were his personal property so could take them with him, whatever he wanted, so fdr established a precedent of creating a presidential library where all the records go to one place and scholars, interested citizens, students, researchers, could go to this one facility and have all the records compiled in one place. so each president after him followed that precedent, and established their own presidential library. eventually, congress passed a presidential libraries act that set the rules and parameters for how this would work. so fast forward back to 1978,

president nixon, you know, claimed that these were his personal property. congress thought, well, this material here, we do not want to have this appear based on watergate so he passed a law that changed ownership from the president, former president, to the federal government. so the minute the january 20th at noon, those papers become the property of the federal government. >> and what role does the national archives and records administration play? well the national archives plays two important roles. one on the front end, advise the white house of managing the records while the president is in office, how you're supposed to file them, where they're supposed to go, what you do with them, and then, again, on january 20th, they take actual physical possession of the records. but during a president's administration, it's not like the national archives waits four years. they're actually going over

their periodically and taking materials and taking them back to the national archive so it's not a giant dump of materials on january 20th. materials are going over there constantly during the presidency but there are archival staff, when, well, i may get ahead of your next question. but there are, when you get to work at the white house, you are trained on how to manage your records. okay. you are told this is what you do with them, this is how you save them. and there are archival staff at the white house that are there for consultation so if you're sitting there like i don't know what to do with this, there are people there that can tell you what to do. >> that was my next question, i mean how do they know what should be saved and what shouldn't be saved. is everything part of the record? >> well, that's for the archivists to determine, not for them. you know, if i send you an email and say let's go to lunch today,

that's really not a presidential record. those things get called out by the national archive eventually, but that's their job, it's not the employee's job to say well, you know, i'm going to ditch this. everything is supposed to be preserved and that's just, you know, when in doubt, save it, not throw it out. you know, when in doubt, throw it out, it's when it doubt, save it. >> and talking about this because of the headlines in the paper this week like this one today, 15 boxes inside the long, strange trip of trump's classified records. what happened? >> we don't know what happened. and that's why the national archives has referred this to the department of justice. one of the dangers that you have when something like this happens

is you don't know who, are those boxes just in a closet somewhere? are they lying out in his office? i mean there are concerns, there are classified materials in there. who can have access to those materials? you could have people going in there and taking the records and walking out with them. there's no chain of, i guess we could say chain of custody that the records are there and no one has responsibility for them then who knows, right, you don't want potentially classified information like that just laying in a box. so -- >> how do they know that's, the national archives, how will they know what's missing? >> it's kind of like when a tree falls in the forest and there's no one there, did the tree fall? we don't know. and that's the danger of the situation is we don't know. you don't know what's missing if

it's not there if that makes any sense at all to you, and it's frightening, because, you know, we're going through tumultuous period in our nation's history, one studied by historians, will be, for centuries. and one way to describe is historians need records to write an accurate and complete history and the citizens of our country are entitled to know what their government is up to. if the records aren't there, then, you know, historians can't do their job. and in essence, let me put it, i don't know if this is a perfect analogy but say the historian's job, and when they're writing a book, is they're building a house. well, you know, president trump is potentially driving away with the cement mixer to pour the foundation for the house which if the are records aren't there, how is a historian in the future supposed to be able to do their work? so it's a frightening, it's a

frightening situation. and potentially fraught with long-term implications for our country because as you can see now with the january 6 committee, they're trying to find documents. they've sent requests up to the, over to the national archives to find materials and this is apparently how we got confirmation that president trump was ripping up documents and people were scotch-taping them back together so it's a frightening scenario and one of the things you should know too is the national archives is not very big. they're under-funded, under-staffed and to comply with these january 6 committee requests they're having to pull staff from other place to see do this job. and the same thing happened, you might remember when supreme court justice kavanaugh's confirmation hearing, he worked at the white house and the

counsel's office, national archive said to pull people from other places to just rapidly search for those records so i mean it's an, it is related but it's, they're under-funded and under-staffed and have been for a very long time. >> washington post reports that the tale of these 15 boxes and material contained within underscores how defiantly and indiscriminately trump defiled the law, related to a president's official duty and see turning over to the national archive, instead, starting in his presidency and continuing in post-presidency, treating as mundane with the same disregard and chaos that characterized his term in office. can someone be held accountable for this and if so, how? >> well, i'm just going to, let me read you something really

quickly. this is a letter that we sent to harry reed, mitch mcconnell, john baner, it says unfortunately while the presidential act requires record it fails to have requirement, we feel it must be strengthened to ensure such devastating loss must never again take place. the date of the letter is december 5th, 2008, so it's not as if if we didn't know this was a problem. it's been a problem for some time. as you saw, one of the issues we found in the impeachment, it's not like you can indict a sitting president for violation of the records act. the act is very weak. i do know that your viewers may not know the former national

security adviser sandy bergar under president clinton was actually prosecuted for, he went in, he was writing, i don't know whether it was a court appearance or what he was doing but needed access to the records from when he was national security adviser and went into the archives, was in a secure room and caught stealing documents and he was prosecuted. but that's the only prosecution that i know of off the top of my head under the presidential records act. >> taking your questions and comments on the presidential records act with lee white this morning, begin dialing in, republicans, democrats, independent, lines are on your screen. act was amended in 2014, what was changed? >> well, they strengthened, there was some confusion because when the first presidential records act was passed in 1978, nobody used email, so it clarified -- a lot