President Trump’s penchant for secrecy is about to be tested in court President Trump L and Russian President Vladimir Putin meeting in Helsinki in July Brendan Smialowski AFP Getty Images By Editorial Board May 12 at 7 22 PM AMONG THE mysteries surrounding President Trump’s conduct one of the strangest is his penchant for meeting President Vladimir Putin of Russia without aides or interpreters contrary to the practice of past presidents The Post’s Greg Miller has quoted U S officials as saying there is no detailed record even in classified files of Mr Trump’s face-to-face interactions with the Russian leader at five locations over the past two years and in one case Mr Trump seized the notes made by an interpreter who was present This peculiar behavior is about to be tested in court Three groups have brought a lawsuit seeking to force Mr Trump and his advisers to follow the laws that govern presidential and federal agency records So far they allege the president has failed to do so At issue are the Presidential Records Act which covers Mr Trump’s activities and the Federal Records Act which covers agencies such as the State Department In normal procedure State provides interpreters for such meetings The presidential records law was passed by Congress in 1978 after Richard M Nixon’s resignation to prevent Nixon from destroying or otherwise disposing of his records and secretly recorded White House conversations The law established that records of the presidency relating to duties of the office are the property of the American people and it ended the previous tradition of presidential records belonging to former presidents Importantly the law also demands that the president take care to ensure his activities are documented and preserved for eventual access by the public — a vital form of accountability Likewise the Federal Records Act requires government officials to document their activities and preserve their history The three organizations questioning Mr Trump’s adherence to the law are Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington a nonprofit government accountability group the National Security Archive a leading nonprofit research group at George Washington University that uses the Freedom of Information Act extensively and the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations which represents scholars seeking to document U S diplomacy In addition to Mr Trump’s meetings with Mr Putin the groups question in their lawsuit whether an adequate record exists of the president’s conversations with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un in Hanoi or of senior White House aide Jared Kushner’s meetings with Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman The failure to document these meetings is not only about compliance with the law Mr Trump’s secrecy deprives his own advisers of knowledge about what is going on and thus harms their ability to give him good advice It will blast a huge crater in the work of historians who attempt to piece together what transpired in Mr Trump’s presidency It also deprives the American people of a basic method of holding Mr Trump accountable for his performance No doubt he likes it that way But the courts must insist that no president is above the law including the law for keeping honest and full records of the presidency