Presidents from both parties have followed tightly restricted procedures that conform to the Presidential Records Act of 1978, which was enacted after Watergate.
WASHINGTON — For the three years that former President Barack Obama wrote his 768-page memoir after leaving the White House, the millions of pages of his official presidential records were locked away in warehouses in Washington and Chicago.
Each time Mr. Obama wanted to review something, his aides submitted precise requests to the National Archives and Records Administration. Sometimes, documents would be encrypted and loaded onto a laptop that would be brought to Mr. Obama at his office in Washington. Other times, a paper document would be placed in a locked bag for his perusal, and later returned the same way.
The tightly restricted process that Mr. Obama followed to gain access to the 30 million records from his presidency stands in stark contrast to former President Donald J. Trump’s seemingly haphazard handling of some of the government’s most sensitive documents after he left office in early 2021. People familiar with the actions of other recent presidents from both parties described similar, librarylike procedures to see documents, conforming to rules set out in the Presidential Records Act, which was passed in 1978.
The difference underscores how rare it is for one of the country’s recent presidents to flout the rules about presidential records. And it helps to put into a broader context the F.B.I.’s decision to search Mr. Trump’s estate in Florida after concluding that the former president had taken thousands of documents, including some that were classified as top secret.
Aides to Mr. Trump have recounted his chaotic last days in the White House in 2021, as the president and some of his allies tried in vain to cling to power. They said boxes of documents were frantically assembled in the dining room outside the Oval Office and in Mr. Trump’s personal residence in the main White House building, even as the country reeled from the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol.
Much of the presidential archive is transferred digitally, which makes it all the more striking that Mr. Trump appears to have taken so many paper documents. Historians and White House officials described a methodical process used by presidential staff members to keep track of who produces digital documents so that they can be archived.
People who work in the White House are generally required to use phones and laptops issued by the administration, to make archiving easier. And work performed on personal or home computers must be printed out or forwarded so that it can be cataloged and sent to the archives when the president leaves.
It is unclear how many of the last-minute boxes that Mr. Trump and his aides packed up were turned over to the archives. But according to federal officials, dozens of boxes of documents ended up in the former president’s custody.
That is not the way it’s supposed to happen.
“At 12:01 on Jan. 20, those documents become property of the United States government,” said Lee White, the executive director of the National Coalition for History.
People familiar with the departures of Mr. Obama, a Democrat, and former Presidents George W. Bush, a Republican, and Bill Clinton, a Democrat, said the process of identifying presidential records and sending them to the archives begins months, if not years, before a president leaves the White House for the final time at noon on Jan. 20.
In Mr. Obama’s case, the process involved the transfer of millions of digital files from White House systems to the archives. That began months before the president ended his second term, and was done without the direct involvement of Mr. Obama, according to a person familiar with the procedures.
According to the archives, “the Obama Presidential Library has the largest set of electronic holdings in the presidential library system, with approximately 250 terabytes of data including approximately 300 million email messages.”
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Mr. Obama’s office near Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood has a secure facility for making calls and reviewing classified documents. But aides to Mr. Obama said he did not request to see any classified documents while writing his book.
“As required by the P.R.A., former President Obama has no control over where and how NARA stores the presidential records of his administration,” the National Archives and Records Administration said in a statement this month, referring to the Presidential Records Act.
Mr. Bush, who left office in 2009, also delivered millions of documents to the archives. People familiar with the transfer of that information said it happened on a regular basis throughout the president’s two terms. One person recalled that any documents deemed protected by the Presidential Records Act would be sent every day by the president’s staff secretary to the Office of Records Management, for eventual transfer to the archives.
Even presidents who were not subject to the 1978 records act have historically treated official documents with care. Michael Beschloss, a historian and a longtime board member for the National Archives Foundation, said that Dwight D. Eisenhower kept classified documents at Fort Ritchie, a military installation in Maryland, while he was in Gettysburg, Pa., writing his memoirs. The former president and military commander would have to apply to see the documents, Mr. Beschloss said.
After the F.B.I. searched Mr. Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate this month, the former president lashed out, and at one point accused Mr. Obama of having left office with many classified documents.
“President Barack Hussein Obama kept 33 million pages of documents, much of them classified,” Mr. Trump said in a statement to the press. “How many of them pertained to nuclear? Word is, lots!”
That accusation prompted a quick reply from the archives, which refuted Mr. Trump’s claim.
The National Archives “assumed exclusive legal and physical custody of Obama presidential records when President Barack Obama left office in 2017, in accordance with the Presidential Records Act,” the statement said, adding that in addition to about 30 million pages of unclassified records, the agency “maintains the classified Obama presidential records in a NARA facility in the Washington, D.C., area.”
The archives’ authority over presidential records dates back to the beginning of the Reagan administration, the result of a Watergate-era backlash over attempts by former President Richard M. Nixon to maintain control over millions of pages of papers and hundreds of hours of audiotapes that helped force his resignation.
Nixon initially reached a deal with President Gerald R. Ford that would have given him control over his papers, the ability to take them to his post-presidential retreat in California and — most controversially — the ability to destroy or modify them as he wished.
But an act passed by Congress after Nixon left office in August 1974 forced him to take his fight to court. He eventually lost at the Supreme Court, in a 7-to-2 decision.
The legal tug of war over Nixon’s documents led to the passage of the Presidential Records Act. Former President Jimmy Carter signed the act into law, and it went into effect on the first day of Ronald Reagan’s term in 1981.
“At the time that Nixon went to California, these rules were at best somewhat ambiguous and the country was relying on the patriotism of a president, as with Eisenhower, following these rules,” Mr. Beschloss said. “What Nixon showed the country was that you couldn’t rely on that good will.”
The current case involving Mr. Trump is another test of the power of the presidency. His office has said he had a “standing order” that materials removed from the Oval Office and taken to the White House residence were deemed to be declassified the moment he removed them, although none of the three potential crimes cited in the F.B.I. search warrant depends on whether removed documents are classified.
National security experts also reject the idea of a standing declassification order, saying that even a presidential directive to remove a document’s classification must follow a rigorous process.
Mr. Trump has accused the F.B.I. and the Justice Department of exceeding their authority and of going beyond what the law requires. But the history of the last 40 years suggests that it is Mr. Trump whose handling of his presidential documents is out of the norm.
“In the same way Nixon thought the White House tapes were his,” said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian, “he just fails to understand that you are a servant in the White House, that you don’t own the materials produced there.”
Peter Baker and Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.
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