Congress Subpoenas a Man's Autocomplete.

There is a filing cabinet in Washington where the republic keeps its important papers, and two congressmen would like to add a new drawer: the chat window.

Reps. Jamie Raskin and Robert Garcia wrote to the White House on October 28 with a demand that reads, at first glance, like a parody of oversight and, on second glance, is still exactly that but real. Every prompt the president or his staff submitted to AI chatbots — Grok, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity — plus every answer those chatbots gave back, must be preserved as presidential records under the Presidential Records Act. "This is not optional," they wrote, which is the kind of sentence people write when they suspect it might turn out to be optional. They also want a closed-door briefing by November 11.

The letter follows reports, from Time and TechCrunch on October 1, that the president spent hours asking Grok questions during a December 2025 Oval Office meeting — including how Venezuelans would react to the capture of Nicolás Maduro — and came away thinking Grok was ingenious. Weeks later, the military operation happened. The White House's answer to all of this is that it preserves all required records in accordance with the law, which is the kind of sentence people write when they would like the conversation to end.

Set aside the politics for a second, because the comedy is structural. Congress has spent decades fighting over emails, tapes, and diaries. Now the frontier of the republic's memory is a prompt box. Somewhere, in a folder that will one day be opened by historians in white gloves, there will sit a transcript of a head of state asking a chatbot a question, and a chatbot answering with total confidence, and a staffer presumably printing it out and filing it under "P" for "Presidential" and also for "Please, no."

That is the joke, and it lands on Congress, where it belongs: the institution that looked at the most powerful office on earth, watched it consult a chatbot, and responded not with awe or horror but with paperwork. Not "stop asking the robot." Just "save the robot's answers." The republic will be remembered, in full, in triplicate, autocomplete included.

Sources: Politico (Oct. 29, 2026); U.S. House Oversight Democrats letter (Oct. 28, 2026); Nextgov/FCW (Oct. 29, 2026).