Former President Trump’s administration took the presidential documents to Mar-a-Lago instead of submitting them to the U.S. archive. Why does this matter? [ dur: 26mins. ]

In recent months, investigators discovered that a significant number of records from the Trump White House were relocated to his personal residence in Mar-a-Lago, Florida. This removal of official papers from the White House poses a significant threat for the security of classified information. But perhaps most importantly, it serves as a major concern for future historians to write accurate and detailed histories of the presidency. We explore the Presidential Records Act and how the law is applied.

• Jeremi Suri is Professor in the Department of History and the LBJ School of Public Affairs at University of Texas, Austin. He holds the Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs at The University of Texas at Austin. He is the co-author of “Problems with President Records are Not Just About Trump” with Kenneth Osgood. His publications also include The Impossible Presidency: The Rise and Fall of America’s Highest Office and Foreign Policy Breakthroughs: Cases in Successful Diplomacy. He is host of the podcast This is Democracy

We turn our attention to a country rarely in the news, Uzbekistan. What do we know about the country, particularly its religious freedoms? Uzbekistan is an Islamic country. But does it respect the rights of its Muslims? If so, why does the country imprison its people considered prisoners of conscience and religious prisoners? We discuss a new report from the US Commission on International Religious Freedom on Uzbekistan’s Religious and Political Prisoners. [ dur: 32mins. ]

• Steve Swerdlow is Associate Professor of the Practice of Human Rights in the Department of Political and International Relations at the University of Southern California (USC). He was Senior Central Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch. He has conducted extensive field work internationally with a particular focus on Central Asia and the Caucuses. He was Senior Central Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch. He has conducted extensive field work internationally with a particular focus on Central Asia and the Caucuses. He is the author of Uzbekistan’s Religious and Political Prisoners.

This program is produced by Ankine Aghassian, Doug Becker, Melissa Chiprin and Sudd Dongre.

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