“The Presidential Records Act is set up on the notion — like all of our laws — that people are going to comply,” notes a lawyer who follows these issues after service in the Justice Department in both the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations. “There isn’t really a clear legal way to hold the president accountable for this stuff.”

The Records Act gives the president entirely appropriate discretion to control the disposition of his or her records not only in the White House but for a number of years after. There are plenty of areas — personnel decisions, for example — in which a former president might not want sensitive documents released for a long time. Within limits, it is the president who makes those decisions.

But that’s assuming records are kept at all in some way that federal officials have access to them. The lesson of the Clinton email affair is that Hillary Clinton is inclined to set up secret, tightly limited and carefully controlled systems that are outside the reach of federal officials. When Congress expressed an interest in examining Clinton’s server, her personal attorney told lawmakers to forget about it — the whole thing, backups included, had been erased.