The indictment of former President Trump in connection with boxes of records taken from the White House to Mar-A-Lago has spotlighted the importance of how classified records should be handled by government officials. Mar-A-Lago is, however, at bottom a “retro” scandal involving paper records. The vast majority of the government’s records, constituting billions of e-mails and other records, are in electronic form. Whether those records are being preserved and can be accessed in a timely way is a looming issue with much longer-term implications than the current controversy breathlessly covered 24/7 by the media. Can best practices in e-discovery be applied to making government records more accessible, including under the Freedom of Information Act? How can AI, in the form of machine learning and generative AI, contribute to the cause of transparent government? Beyond the headlines, how can the EDRM and greater e-discovery community contribute to making the history of the 21st century, including the form of White House records, more accessible to the American people?

Expert Presenter:

Jason R. Baron is a Professor of the Practice in the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland.