The president took a step toward a police state (This from mainstream media, no less)
The White House needs to tell the Pentagon promptly to destroy the records of protesters as required, within three months.
It’s not that simple. Did other governmental/police agencies access the records and were they given copies? If so, why, and will their data be destroyed too? Ditto for any backups. Once data gets into databases, it can go anywhere, and it becomes difficult if not impossible to destroy, especially if it was online. Of course, this assumes they would actually destroy the data when ordered to and not lie about doing so.