Who Controls Trump’s 2021 Letter to Biden Now That a Memoir Has Printed It?

Donald Trump’s handwritten letter to Joe Biden, left in the Oval Office on 20 January 2021 and kept private for 2,120 days, became public on 10 November 2026 through Mr Biden’s memoir. The Associated Press reviewed a photocopy: two pages in black Sharpie on White House stationery, addressed “To ’46.”

“Many presidents have come and gone who simply governed as Republicans or Democrats,” Mr Trump wrote, according to the AP account, presidents who in his telling were carried along by history rather than changing it. “This will not happen to you because I know how much you love the American people.” The memoir, Promise Me, America, goes on sale on 17 November; its first excerpt ran in The Atlantic on Monday 9 November, ABC News reported. Asked about it, Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, said Mr Biden “should have heeded the President’s wise words” and that “instead he tried to destroy this country and weaponize the justice system against his political enemies,” the AP reported.

The text is now public. The paper is a separate question, and federal law answers it in a way neither man’s account has addressed.

What the statute says the letter is

The Presidential Records Act defines a presidential record, in 44 U.S.C. 2201, as documentary material “created or received by the President” in the course of activities relating to “the constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties of the President.” “Correspondence” is named in the definition of documentary material. The exception is a personal record, material “of a purely private or nonpublic character” unconnected with those duties.

A letter from one president to the next, left on the desk in the Oval Office on Inauguration Day and addressed to the office by its number, reads on its face as received in the course of a ceremonial duty. That is this publication’s reading; the National Archives has not, so far as this publication could find, said how it has classified the letter. Both men described it in terms that point the same way. Judd Deere, a Trump White House spokesman, said in January 2021: “It’s a letter between 45 and 46.” Mr Biden called it “very generous” and said, “because it was private, I won’t talk about it until I talk to him,” PolitiFact recorded at the time.

If it is a presidential record of the Biden administration, the statute decides who holds it. Under section 2203(g)(1), on the conclusion of a president’s term “the Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to” those records. Mr Biden’s term ended on 20 January 2025. On that reading the original belongs in the Archivist’s custody, not a former president’s, and what the AP reviewed was a photocopy.

When would the public have seen it anyway?

No earlier than 20 January 2030, unless the Archivist finished processing it first. Section 2204 lets an outgoing president restrict six categories of information for up to 12 years, among them national security, appointments and confidential advice. A congratulatory note from a predecessor appears to fall within none of them. A record outside those categories is shielded from Freedom of Information Act requests until the earlier of five years after the Archivist takes custody or the date the Archivist completes processing it.

The reverse letter shows the other half of the custom. When Mr Trump found Mr Biden’s note in the Resolute Desk on 20 January 2025, he disclosed its text within days. “As I take leave of this sacred office I wish you and your family all the best in the next four years,” it began, WCSC reported on 22 January. In both cases it was the recipient, and a sitting or former president, who decided when the public read the letter. The statute gives that power to nobody else until the clock runs out.

Does publication open the original?

Not directly. The act has one clause about publication, and it applies to the restricted categories: section 2204(b)(1)(B) ends a restriction once the Archivist determines the information “has been placed in the public domain through publication by the former President, or the President’s agents.” A memoir by the former president is the kind of publication the clause describes. If the letter was never restricted, the clause has nothing to lift, and the five-year clock in section 2204(b)(2) still governs public requests for the original, while the text circulates freely.

That gap between a record’s content and the record itself is familiar from other fights over what counts as a government record and from the backlogs that decide when requests are answered. Here it is unusually clean. The words are in a book that goes on sale on 17 November; the two sheets they were written on become requestable, at the latest, in 1,166 days.