He said he had a successful meeting with Putin adding We have those meetings all the time no big deal Democrats however said they thought it was a very big deal and expressed concern about the report on the interpreter It's disturbing of course If it's true it's disturbing and we want to get to the bottom of it US Representative Eliot Engel said in an interview with CNN on Monday Engel said the House Foreign Affairs Committee he chairs is working with the intelligence Committee to discuss a possible subpoena of the Trump-Putin interpreter He said he would prefer not to do that but added We may have no choice But in 1978 Congress passed something called the Presidential Records Act The law changed the ownership of presidential records from private to public To learn more about the act The World's Marco Werman spoke to Tom Blanton the director of nongovernmental National Security Archive at The George Washington University Tom Blanton It's against the law The Presidential Records Act which Congress passed back in 1978 was meant to deal precisely with this because Richard Nixon had said No all those Watergate tapes they're my personal property I can do anything I want to with them And Congress said Nope that's not right If you're working for the taxpayer the records belong to the taxpayer Where the big disputes are is how much review the courts can have over what the president does and how much people like us at the National Security Archive can intervene We've got a lawsuit right now about the White House visitor logs because this business with the interpreter's notes it's not the first time President Trump has tried to push the envelope shall we say or rip up the envelope The World Nixon and his tapes are a great example of this What does the Presidential Records Act say about consequences for a president who doesn't follow the law It's really up to the Congress unfortunately and this Congress has shown very little backbone to enforce consequences The National Archives the government agency has been a bit of an orphan agency — folks like us have had to sue them to get them to intervene The president can't destroy records without the permission of the archivist of the United States and the archivist of the United States is supposed to bring in the attorney general to take action and stop But courts have been really scared to say Wait a second At the very least the court should review This interpreter's notes question though it gets even more interesting because the parallel of Nixon is right on target Nixon and Kissinger were pretty famous for creating multiple versions of a transcript of a conversation with a foreign official So they would make one version that was complete and that would stay only in a White House safe or in Kissinger's safe Another would be more of a summary with kind of the cuss words cut out that could be shared with the State Department Another would be like a one-page gist and they'd share that with the Defense Department And so for historians who've been putting together those conversations the tapes really help because they showed the full Monty if you will and then all these partial versions that we've resurrected you kind of see a consistent pattern of deceit Trump's effort to prevent even a transcript or so-called memoranda of conversation from being available at all is beyond the pale 'The president can't destroy records without the permission of the archivist of the United States and the archivist of the United States is supposed to bring in the attorney general to take action and stop ' Tom Blanton National Security Archive So what records exactly are referred to in the Presidential Records Act like the interpreters' notes from the president's meeting with Putin Would that fall under this act Sure absolutely and something at that very high level of the president's own words and a foreign leader's words would be at the heart of what the Presidential Records Act is about Here it's unclear what Trump is conspiring at It's almost as if — I don't know the metaphor that comes to mind to me is not an analogy to other presidents because we have never had a president like Trump — it's more like a Mafia don It's kind of you only trust the people who are in your family you don't want anybody else really to know what's going on or what you're saying or what promises you're making to foreign governments The most amazing thing to me about Trump's foreign relations has been we the American public have found out more about his conversations with those guys from those governments — like Putin's — the foreign ministry spokesman over there in Moscow will put out a readout on the conversation that's more detailed than anything Sarah Huckabee Sanders gives the folks at the White House Is Congress eventually just going to have to step up and deal with this I mean and especially regarding this meeting in Hamburg and what we know happened in it — or what we don't know Exactly I think both the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee are going to have to hold hearings where they pull in those top senior officials and get them on the recor d What do you know What do you not know What were you told What records did you get to see And that poor interpreter may end up in the crosshairs What's she going to do right The president told her one thing but the Congress has a constitutional obligation to know what's going on in foreign policy But I would even say the courts are going to have to step up We went through this after 9 11 where President George W Bush said the courts don't have a role in judging anything about the war on terror it's all up to the commander-inchief But finally — I think it was Sandra Day O'Connor — who stepped up and said Wait a second Courts get to review whether the executive is obeying and faithfully carrying out the law And I think we're still on the hunt for a federal judge with some backbone who will stand up and say Look you can't do that You can't delete records you can't hide the record of a conversation you can't tear up these documents on your desk and leave them under your table That's just wrong This interviewed has been condensed and edited for clarity Reuters contributed to this report From PRI's The World ©2018 PRI