Trumps lawyers are telling us they have no defense in the secret document investigation.

[FBaggins]

41. The definition and Congress' legislative intent seem pretty clear to me

I suspect it's the same as your own take.

The problem is that when others tried to get the court to enforce that understanding, a judge (that we likely both would respect) said it wasn't NARA or the court's place to make that determination and it was up to the President. Hypothetically, that determination was supposed to be made at the time the record was created... but that too was outside of NARA's ability to evaluate.

This is one of the problems with co-equal branches of government purporting to place restrictions on each other. They can stand for decades before someone challenges them. Presidential records were originally the personal property of the president (they used to be purchased from them). Has anyone challenged whether Congress could change them to the property of the government? It hasn't come to that... but trust TFG to push the envelope. (Remember that the constitution requires both the due process of law and just compensation).

Again - this is why I see the classification debate as relevant to the case when others are saying that it doesn't matter. If they were classified, then the executive branch (acting as agents of TFG) had de-facto declared them as "government business"