Documents at issue include 73 phone calls and 19 meetings between George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin
Defendant National Archives faces “major mission failure” from resource constraints and “digital tsunami”
Washington, D.C., November 21, 2024 - The National Security Archive filed suit in federal court today to contest the estimated 12-year backlog of Freedom of Information requests for presidential records held by the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).
The historic documents at issue in the case are the 73 “telcons” or telephone call transcripts between then-President George W. Bush and Russian President Vladimir Putin in the years 2001 to 2008, along with the “memcons” or meeting transcripts of the 19 face-to-face meetings between Bush and Putin. These records, originally located at the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas, Texas, are now in NARA custody in Washington, D.C., and in College Park, Maryland.
National Security Archive staff filed a Freedom of Information request with the Bush Library over a year ago, in November 2023, listing the date and location of every conversation, whether on the phone or in person, between Bush and Putin. The total number of documents at issue is likely less than 150. In June 2024, the George W. Bush Library informed the Archive “our best estimate at this time is that it may be completed in approximately 12 years.”
The Archive is represented pro bono by the Goodwin Procter law firm, led by Andrew Kim, Jaime Santos, Brian Burgess, and Jordan Lampo. The legal complaint written by the Goodwin Procter team details the “immense and impossible backlog” at the National Archives and the underlying resource constraints that have caused NARA’s failure to meet the public release deadlines under both the FOIA and the Presidential Records Act.
The legal complaint includes an internal document, originally drafted by NARA staff for release in March 2024 but never officially made public, describing the “serious risk of major mission failure” at NARA and the funding needed to fill the “extraordinary gap between increased holdings” and stagnant resources.
The complaint also includes the Kremlin’s own published summary of a Bush-Putin meeting in Slovenia in 2001, one of dozens of such summaries on the Kremlin website, demonstrating that these telcons and memcons no longer deserve withholding or security classification.
The nonprofit nonpartisan National Security Archive, based at George Washington University, has published award-winning books and reference collections on US-Soviet and US-Russian relations, including records of summit meetings during the Reagan, Bush 41, and Clinton administrations with their counterparts Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. The Archive won journalism's prestigious George Polk Award for “piercing self-serving veils of government secrecy.”
The Archive has brought multiple previous lawsuits under the FOIA and other federal records laws that preserved White House emails from the Reagan/Bush administrations and that saved over a billion White House email records and WhatsApp messages from President Trump's first term. Archive lawsuits have opened historic collections ranging from the Kennedy-Khrushchev letters during the Cuban Missile Crisis, to the Chiquita Papers, to Donald Rumsfeld’s “snowflakes” written during the Iraq and Afghan wars.
