“There was no decision on the merits of the case, so no precedent.”
All the legal experts I have heard who discussed the case said the judge ruled, as Trump himself quoted, the records that a president has are his to keep. That was the decision on the merits of the case.
No, the issue of what type records was not brought up because that is an issue that McCarthy pulled out of his ass.
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The Socks Judge also wrote that a President has full, sole authority to classify / declassify - and destroy Docs during his Presidency, so it would only make sense that he would have the power and authority to do so as an Ex President for docs from his time as President.
Notice the word - “Destroy”
A dismissal is not a decision on the merits. When a motion for dismissal is made by the defense, the judge has to evaluate the request assuming everything the plaintiff says is true. So the arguments from the defense are limited to what is in the motion to dismiss. I read the decision, and the judge did not say what Trump said. What she said was that there was nothing in the statute that could force NARA to try to retrieve the tape from Clinton, so the case was dismissed. Clinton had designated the tapes as personal. When asked by JW to reconsider classifying the tapes as presidential records, NARA agreed that they were personal and declined to try to recover them.
In the decision, when discussing whether or not the court had any ability to get involved in the case, she cited the DC Circuit court:
“Courts are accorded the power to review guidelines outlining, what is, and what is not, a ‘presidential record’ under the terms of the PRA. The PRA does not bestow on the President the power to assert sweeping authority over whatever materials he chooses to designate as presidential records without any possibility of judicial review.
Id. at 1290. The court stated that Armstrong I only barred judicial review of “creation, management, and disposal decisions” of the President and not “the initial classification of existing materials.” Id. at 1294.
Nowhere in the opinion does the judge rule that the records a president has are his to keep. She does say that in her opinion there is no mechanism in the PRA to require a change in the classification of documents after the fact. It also does not say that any documents not classified as personal or presidential are automatically classified as personal just because the president takes them with him. It seems if the documents were not classified either way, NARA could choose to take actions to recover them. So I think part of the question will be if Trump bothered to classify the documents as personal before he left office, or just took them.
And there is still the issue that the PRA excludes agency records from both presidential and personal records under the Act. To change that would require getting a court to rule the PRA unconstitutional, which would remove using the PRA and the Clinton Socks case as a defense, leaving only the Espionage Act.