THE WASHINGTON POST: Trump library says no Twitter DMs can be found, despite evidence he sent them

The newly operational Trump Presidential Library, the entity responsible for preserving records from the White House, says that it cannot find a single Twitter direct message sent by a President who tweeted more than 25,000 times during his first administration.

This no-records response to a Freedom of Information Act request from The Washington Post comes as the Trump administration argues it does not need to follow the Presidential Records Act, a law designed to ensure the public has access to records of the President after he leaves office.

On January 20, The Washington Post filed a FOIA request with the Trump library for all direct messages sent from the President’s Twitter accounts @realDonaldTrump and @POTUS during his first term.

Despite evidence that the President did use the messaging feature, the library, a division of the National Archives and Records Administration, told The Post that “(w)e have been unable to locate any records related to” any direct message, or DM, sent by Trump during his first term as president.

An occasional series explaining public records and how they illuminate the inner workings of government.

If Mr Trump did send DMs and did not preserve them, he may have violated the Presidential Records Act as it has been understood for decades.

The act requires departing presidents to turn over all records “which relate to or have an effect upon the carrying out of the constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President” to the National Archives. This includes direct messages sent via any type of software or application.

Plans were made in the waning days of the first Trump administration to preserve Mr Trump’s social media activity. The National Archives published a notice of intent on January 14, 2021, to contract with ArchiveSocial, a software company, to “capture and manage (Presidential Records Act) social media accounts.”

But David Ferriero, then the archivist of the United States, in a February 18, 2022, letter to members of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform wrote that the Trump administration had “opted not to enable capture of direct messages” with the software.

The National Archives, the White House and the company that owns ArchiveSocial did not respond to questions about steps taken to preserve messages and why, if Trump had sent DMs via Twitter during his first presidential term, none could be found.

The Presidential Records Act became law in 1978 in response to Richard M. Nixon’s attempts to destroy records about his presidency after he resigned from office. The law codified that presidential communications belong to the American people once a president leaves office, and imposed requirements for preservation and access.

The National Archives typically preserves such records through the libraries established by former presidents. On March 31, Mr Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that his presidential library would be in the “best location in Miami” and that it would also be, “most likely, a hotel, with a beautiful building underneath and a 747 Air Force One in the lobby.”

While Mr Trump’s physical library is just a concept, Mr Trump’s actual papers from his first administration - the vast majority of which are digital - are now subject to FOIA requests. The Presidential Records Act requires records not exempt from disclosure to be made public five years after a president leaves office. This includes records that are not classified as secret, those for which there is no attorney-client privilege and those that are not purely personal.

But on April 1, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel published an opinion arguing that, in passing the law, Congress overstepped its authority to regulate the executive branch. Therefore, it contended, “the PRA is unconstitutional, and the President need not further comply with its dictates.”

The next day, White House counsel David Alan Warrington issued record-keeping guidance to White House staff members in a memo and acknowledged that he had asked the Justice Department to review the constitutionality of the Presidential Records Act. Mr Warrington’s memo said that, according to the opinion, White House offices were “free to” - but not required to - “retain the records retention policies developed under the (Presidential Records Act).”

The most striking departure from existing White House policy involved text messaging: “Text messages should only be preserved when they are the sole record of official decision-making, government action, or contain unique information not available elsewhere.” Mr Warrington wrote that while “the broad and unconstitutional text of the PRA certainly suggests that” preserving texts is required, “(c)omplying with such a requirement would be immensely time consuming and costly.”

The Justice Department has also argued that FOIA deadlines should not apply to presidential records.

In a response to multiple lawsuits seeking records from the first Trump administration, the Justice Department has asked a court to depart from the typical practice of setting a schedule for when overdue records must be produced. Instead, the department argued, the court should dismiss most of the claims on the ground that FOIA’s deadlines are not enforceable on requests subject to the Presidential Records Act. Requesters should “wait their turn ... like everyone else,” the Government asserted in its April 29 court filing.

Evidence of communications

Despite the no-records response to The Post’s request for DMs sent by Mr Trump, there is evidence that Mr Trump communicated through DMs on Twitter.

Court records show that Twitter produced at least 32 DMs sent to or from the @realDonaldTrump account between October 2020 and January 2021 in response to a warrant sought by special counsel Jack Smith as part of his investigation into Mr Trump’s role in the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. A lawyer for Twitter told the US District Court for the District of Columbia that “there are confidential communications” in Mr Trump’s Twitter account, although “we don’t know the context of (them).”

In September 2025, many observers speculated that Mr Trump accidentally publicly posted a Truth Social post that he meant to send privately as a direct message on that platform to then-Attorney General Pam Bondi imploring her to take action against his political enemies. The message read, “Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, ‘same old story as last time, all talk, no action.’” He then wrote, “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

Because of the Archives’ snail-like speed in processing requests for records - it reports a pending FOIA from April 2006 - I knew that if The Post wanted to review records from Mr Trump’s first administration, we had to file requests as soon as records became subject to disclosure. So, I met with Aaron Schaffer - The Post’s crack news researcher - and brainstormed about requests.

We filed them via email at 12.01am on January 20, exactly five years after the end of Mr Trump’s first term. In addition to requesting any DMs Mr Trump sent, we also requested records about the killing of Post contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi, Mr Trump’s communications with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, photographs taken by the White House on January 6, 2021, and other documents.

We’re still waiting for records.

While FOIA requesters can bring lawsuits to force disclosure, the Presidential Records Act has extremely weak mechanisms to force an administration to save records in the first place.

Even when Mr Trump took took more than 20,000 pages of presidential records to Mar-a-Lago, his personal residence in Palm Beach, Florida, at the end of his first term, the Justice Department did not invoke the Presidential Records Act. Instead, it charged him with violating the Espionage Act by allegedly mishandling classified information.

News reports have documented that Mr Trump may have failed to preserve records during his first administration as required by the law.

“It’s been well-reported that there were records that were torn up into bits and pieces that were taped back together by staff, there were some that were attempted to be flushed down toilets, questions as to whether or not his phone or electronic communication was preserved in its entirety or not,” said Sarah Weicksel, executive director of the American Historical Association.

Her organization, the American Historical Association, is currently one of several organizations suing the Trump administration over its claims that the Presidential Records Act is unconstitutional. In response, US District Judge John D. Bates ordered the White House to comply with the law as the litigation proceeds.

Despite the Trump administration’s attacks on the Presidential Records Act, the National Archives and the Trump Presidential Library say they are still processing The Post’s FOIA requests for Trump’s presidential records.

We have appealed the no-records response and asked the presidential library to conduct a better search for any DMs sent by Mr Trump.

Aaron Schaffer contributed to this report.

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