Barry Landau

The rightful owners of all the stolen documents recovered have been identified. As of May 2013, only twenty percent of the documents have been returned to them, with the remainder to be returned in the following months.

Both defendants pleaded guilty, Savedoff in October 2011 and Landau in February 2012. On June 27, 2012, Landau was sentenced to seven years in prison. He also had to pay restitution of $46,525 to dealers who had unwittingly purchased stolen documents from him.

On July 9, 2011, a staff member saw Savedoff take a document out of the society's library in Baltimore and police were called. They found sixty documents hidden in Savedoff's laptop case in a locker, several of them having been signed out by Landau. According to Landau’s plea agreement, from December 2010 through July 2011, Landau and Savedoff stole documents from numerous institutions, including the Maryland Historical Society, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Connecticut Historical Society, the University of Vermont, the New York Historical Society, and the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, a component of the National Archives.

Landau and Savedoff were jailed in Baltimore and indicted by a federal grand jury in late July 2011. Landau was released with GPS monitoring. Savedoff surrendered his American and Canadian passports, and was released on $250,000 bail.

In 2007, Landau wrote a book titled The President's Table and showed off some prized pieces of his collection on The Martha Stewart Show. He also served as a commentator on CNN and NBC's Today Show.

He amassed such a large collection of presidential memorabilia that, in 2005, Larry Bird, a curator of the National Museum of American History, stated that he possessed "the most extensive collection of inaugural memorabilia outside the Smithsonian, the National Archives or the presidential libraries."

For the 2001 inauguration of George W. Bush, the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies turned to him for china plates for the inaugural luncheon.

He worked as a press agent in New York in the 1970s and 1980s. He also claimed that "he was a protocol officer under President Gerald R. Ford and that he once traveled to Moscow with President Richard M. Nixon," though the presidential libraries could find no supporting evidence.

Barry H. Landau (born c. 1948) is a noted thief of presidential artifacts, collector of presidential artifacts, author, and "self-styled 'America's Presidential Historian'". In July 2011, Landau's associate, 24-year-old Jason Savedoff, was seen taking a document out of a library. After an investigation and various searches, Landau and Savedoff were "charged with stealing valuable historical documents from the Maryland Historical Society and conspiring to steal documents from other archives." After pleading guilty, Landau was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment in June 2012.