It is about whether a president can treat government records as personal property — deciding for himself what will be preserved, what will be disclosed, and what can simply be destroyed," she said."The court's decision helps ensure that the American people — not the White House — retain ownership over the historical record of the presidency. This is not the first time Mr Trump has attempted to circumvent long-held record-keeping conventions.After his first presidential term, the US National Archives retrieved 15 boxes of records that were improperly taken from the White House to his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago.The NARA retrieved the documents more than a year past the deadline by which Mr Trump should have handed them over The FBI then handed back the boxes of documents it had seized.CREW said in a statement that Mr Trump's first term included "numerous record-keeping scandals, culminating in multiple indictments for his handling of classified documents after leaving office"."It is clear that the Trump administration wishes it could return the country to a pre-Watergate status quo in which records of the president's and White House's official conduct are the private property of the president — records he can destroy, sell, or withhold from the public at will — but that is not reality," the statement said.The White House said in an email to staff that it intends to appeal.