Donald Trump’s newly launched presidential library says it cannot find a single direct message sent by the president from his Twitter account despite the prolific poster firing off thousands of tweets during his first administration.
The Trump Presidential Library’s response to a Freedom of Information Act by The Washington Post follows several lawsuits against the administration’s policy memo stating that it doesn’t need to follow the Presidential Records Act.
The administration’s response could also contradict Twitter’s own testimony that the president had either sent or received at least 32 messages in the months leading up to the 2020 presidential election and the Capitol attack on January 6, 2021.
Those messages were not revealed in court documents surrounding special counsel Jack Smith’s federal criminal case against the president over his alleged conspiracy to overturn election results. But the library, under the National Archives and Records Administration, told The Post that it was “unable to locate any records related to” any DM sent by Trump during his first term as president.
In April, the Department of Justice unilaterally determined that the landmark public records transparency law is unconstitutional and threatens the “constitutional independence and autonomy” of the president. A federal judge has ordered the administration to follow the law and blocked the destruction of any presidential and vice presidential records while legal battles are ongoing.
The Presidential Records Act of 1978, implemented in the aftermath of Richard Nixon’s attempts to destroy his records after resigning from office, mandates that all records be preserved and eventually transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration at the end of a president’s term.
Those records are then typically preserved inside libraries established by former presidents.
Trump hasn’t built a physical library, yet. He told reporters at the White House earlier this year that the library wouldn’t actually be a library at all but “most likely, a hotel, with a beautiful building underneath and a 747 Air Force One in the lobby” in Miami, Florida.
Proposed designs, created by Florida-based firm Bermello Ajamil & Partners, show a sleek skyscraper with a red, white and blue spire and the word “Trump” in large illuminated letters above an American flag.
The building, which bears a resemblance to New York City’s One World Trade Center, is set to have the presidential 747 jet gifted to Trump by Qatar on display.
Other touches include a gold escalator, like the one in Trump Tower in New York, and a gold statue of the president raising his arm, appearing to model his defiant pose after surviving an assassination attempt in 2024.
“Over the past six months, I have poured my heart and soul into this project with my incredible team at [The Trump Organization],” Eric Trump wrote on X in March. “This landmark on the water in Miami, Florida will stand as a lasting testament to an amazing man, an amazing developer, and the greatest President our Nation has ever known.”
April’s memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel claimed that the Presidential Records Act of 1978 “exceeds Congress’s enumerated and implied powers, and it aggrandizes the Legislative Branch at the expense of the constitutional independence and autonomy” of the president.
The president “need not further comply” with the Watergate-era law, according to the memo.
Several groups swiftly filed federal lawsuits to block the memo, which the American Historical Association and watchdog group American Oversight condemned as Trump’s illegal pass to “destroy records of his official government conduct, or even spirit away the records for his own future personal use.”
“In the Administration’s view, the records of the official activities of the President and nearly 1,000 White House employees — generated using taxpayer funds, on government property, regarding official government business — belong to the President personally, and not to the American people. Government for the people, by the people, and of the people this is not,” according to a lawsuit filed by the groups.
A federal judge issued a preliminary injunction on May 20 in a ruling that quoted George Orwell’s 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past.”
The “’gravit’ of the presidency “ does not free it from modest constraint,” wrote Judge John Bates. “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.”
Dr. Sarah Weicksel, executive director of the American Historical Association, said the order is “an important step forward in ensuring that the documents that tell our nation’s history are preserved for future generations.”
The Trump administration’s latest revelation — that Trump never sent a DM on Twitter during his first four years in office — appears to clash with Twitter’s own testimony about what it uncovered from the president’s account.
The former president was a voracious user of his @realDonaldTrump but was suspended by the platform in the wake of the January 6 attack “due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” the company said at the time.
Following Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of the social media company and its transformation into X, the president was allowed to return, though he has rarely posted to that account while using his own Truth Social platform as his official White House sounding board.
While investigating Trump’s alleged conspiracy to reverse his election loss, Jack Smith’s team issued a warrant for Twitter records, which produced evidence of at least 32 DM sent between October 2020 and January 2021.
“Indeed, the materials Twitter produced to the Government included only 32 direct-message items, constituting a minuscule proportion of the total production,” prosecutors wrote in 2023.
The contents of those messages, and whether they were sent or received by the president, remain unclear.
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