The new Trump Presidential Library had a remarkable response when asked to hand over Donald Trump’s Twitter messages from his first term.
The library, a division of the National Archives and Records Administration tasked with preserving White House records, told The Washington Post in response to a Freedom of Information Act request that “[w]e have been unable to locate any records related to” any direct message sent by Trump during his stint in the White House.
The Post had filed the request on Jan. 20, seeking all DMs sent from Trump’s @realDonaldTrump and @POTUS accounts.
The problem with that answer is that court records tell a different story. Twitter produced at least 32 DMs sent to or from the @realDonaldTrump account between October 2020 and January 2021, in response to a warrant sought by special counsel Jack Smith as part of his investigation into Trump’s role in the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
A lawyer for Twitter, now known as X after Elon Musk’s purchase of the company in 2022, told a federal court in Washington that “there are confidential communications” in Trump’s account, though “we don’t know the context of [them].”
There is also the small matter of what appeared to be an accidental public post. In September 2025, Trump appeared to post publicly on Truth Social what many observers believed was intended as a private direct message to then-Attorney General Pam Bondi.
The message read, “Pam: I have reviewed over 30 statements and posts saying that, essentially, ‘same old story as last time, all talk, no action.’” He then added, “JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”
If Trump did send direct messages during his first term and failed to preserve them, he may have run afoul of the Presidential Records Act—a law that has been understood for decades to require departing presidents to hand over all records “which relate to or have an effect upon the carrying out of the constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President.” That includes direct messages sent through any application.
There had been a plan to capture Trump’s social media activity. The National Archives published a notice of intent in January 2021 to contract with a software company called ArchiveSocial to “capture and manage” presidential social media accounts under the Presidential Records Act.
But David Ferriero, who was then the archivist of the United States, wrote in a February 2022 letter to members of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform that the Trump administration had “opted not to enable capture of direct messages” with that software.
The Daily Beast has asked the National Archives, the White House, and the company that owns ArchiveSocial for comment on this story.
