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As former U.S. President Donald Trump remained under investigation for potentially mishandling classified government documents seized by the FBI at his Mar-a-Lago estate, conservative outlets began accusing former President Barack Obama’s foundation of mishandling his own presidential records. For example, on Sept. 22, 2022, PJ Media, a right-leaning organization, claimed that The Obama Foundation stored classified documents in an abandoned furniture warehouse, according to a 2018 letter from the Obama Foundation to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA). In addition to stating that a letter of agreement from September 2018 between the foundation and NARA on the digitization of Obama’s presidential documents, the article said the foundation not only acknowledged possessing classified documents but also admitted that they kept them in a facility that did not meet NARA standards for the storage of those documents. The section of the letter quoted in the article states (bolded by PJ Media): The full letter can be read here, and does indeed state the above. What the article fails to mention is that this was an agreement in which the foundation provided funds to move documents, but did not state that the foundation had control or access to those documents. There are also no ongoing investigations or credible accusations against the Obama Foundation for mishandling said documents. According to the National Archives website, the Barack Obama Presidential Library is located at 2500 W. Golf Road in the Hoffman Estates, Illinois, and contains unclassified materials, while classified records were eventually moved to the Washington, D.C., area. On Aug. 12, 2022, NARA released a statement on the location of these materials, and who maintained responsibility for them (emphasis ours): This location is indeed a former furniture store, but that is hardly unusual. According to the Chicago Tribune, the space was leased in February 2016 by the General Services Administration (GSA) and NARA took official custody of the documents on Jan. 20, 2017, the day of Trump’s inauguration. However, they were able to begin managing and handling the documents before then. The location is an old Plunkett’s store which was shuttered in 2009, and, contrary to the claims by PJ Media, it is secured and not open to the public. The Tribune reported that Obama’s documents would remain there until the opening of the Obama Presidential Center, and only then would some documents be available for public viewing. The article also noted that documents of previous presidents were also kept in temporary storage facilities. George H.W. Bush’s papers were kept in a strip mall space previously occupied by a bowling alley and a Chinese restaurant, for example, while Bill Clinton’s were in a former Oldsmobile dealership near his future library in Arkansas. Obama’s Presidential Center’s construction appears to still be in progress. Since the Obama Foundation is privately run, it will need to request to borrow artifacts or records from NARA to display at the center. NARA has said that they did receive funding from the Obama Foundation to help digitize the records, but NARA remains responsible for handling them. We should note that an ex-president, when building a presidential library, is required to provide a privately funded endowment for that library to NARA, and it must cover 60% of the cost of building the library. If the Obama Presidential Center were to include a library, the foundation would have to raise millions to endow it. However, in 2017, NARA and the foundation announced that the Obama library would be digitized, a decision that saved the foundation a lot of money. Under the digitizing plan, NARA would maintain control of all physical copies of documents once they’ve gone online, and store and preserve the original materials in an existing NARA facility that meets NARA’s standards for archival storage. Classified documents would go to a facility in the Washington, D.C., area. On Sept. 23, 2022, NARA released a statement maintaining that the Obama Foundation had no access to their records, which were maintained in Hoffman Estates in accordance with archival storage standards (emphasis ours): The statement directly refutes the claim that the Obama Foundation has access to the materials in Hoffman Estates, while adding that classified records were moved to a separate secure location. The Obama Foundation states the same on its website: We have reached out to the foundation and will update this page if we receive more information.
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