Two senior House Democrats want Donald Trump to save his conversations with AI chatbots after reporting that he asked Elon Musk's Grok how Venezuelans would react if the United States captured Nicolás Maduro. They're questioning whether a private company's chatbot helped shape decisions made inside the White House.
Reps. Jamie Raskin of Maryland and Robert Garcia of California are seeking both the questions Trump submitted and the answers he received. Their request covers Grok, OpenAI's ChatGPT and Anthropic's Claude, including conversations connected to official presidential duties.
POLITICO reported on October 29 that it had obtained their letter to Trump. The lawmakers also requested a briefing by November 11, after the November 3 elections in which Democrats are trying to regain control of the House.
What Trump reportedly asked Grok
The Venezuela question came during a private Oval Office meeting with Musk in December 2025, according to an earlier TIME account described by Techlicious on October 2. An official who attended said Trump spent hours asking the chatbot questions about his presidency and the legacy he would leave behind.
One question was how Venezuelans would respond if American forces captured their president. Grok reportedly described Maduro as widely disliked and predicted that many people would celebrate his removal.
U.S. forces captured Maduro on January 3. The earlier account said Trump was impressed by the chatbot's apparent accuracy after celebrations followed.
That reporting does not establish that Grok determined Trump's decision or took part in military planning. The lawmakers want to examine how the technology was used; their request does not come with a published transcript of Trump's exchanges.
The request goes beyond Venezuela
The letter seeks prompts submitted while Trump was carrying out constitutional, statutory, official or ceremonial duties, along with the responses. Its scope includes presidential work beyond the Maduro operation, rather than one question about public opinion in Venezuela.
Raskin and Garcia warned that White House use of chatbots could expose the country to national security risks and influence from people outside government. They described the technology as "highly manipulable and demonstrably error-prone."
They also challenged Trump's handling of the operation itself. Their letter accused him of consulting Grok while bypassing Congress before ordering military action, and said that approach went around Congress's constitutional power to declare war. That is the Democrats' criticism, rather than a new court ruling on the operation's legality.
The political stakes extend to who gets to pursue those questions. Raskin and Garcia are the top Democrats on the House Judiciary and Oversight committees, respectively. They are expected to take those committees' gavels if their party wins back the chamber.
The White House points to recordkeeping
An administration official responded to POLITICO with a statement that:
"the White House preserves all required records in accordance with the law."
The official did not provide Trump's prompts or the chatbot's responses. Musk had not immediately responded to the outlet's request for comment.
Presidential records already have a legal framework. In its explanation of the Presidential Records Act, the National Archives says:
"The PRA changed the legal ownership of the official records of the President from private to public, and established a new statutory structure under which Presidents, and subsequently NARA, must manage the records of their Administrations."
The law places responsibility for the custody and management of current presidential records with the president. It also requires practical steps to keep personal records separate from presidential records.
Public ownership does not mean immediate public access. The same guidance explains that presidential records transfer to the archivist when a president leaves office. Access under the Freedom of Information Act generally begins five years after an administration ends, with certain restrictions possible for up to 12 years.