Trump FBI search puts unusual spotlight on Archives nominee
WASHINGTON (AP) — As a novelist, Colleen Shogan has imagined the most vivid of Washington dramas.
Larceny at the Library of Congress. A homicide in the House of Representatives. A stabbing in the U.S. Senate.
But Shogan is about to become a protagonist in a storyline too fantastical for fiction — the criminal investigation of a former president — as she prepares to appear before a Senate panel that is considering her nomination to lead the National Archives.
The traditionally staid and low-profile National Archives has been thrust into the public arena by the FBI search of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, intertwined with a criminal investigation that is testing the nation’s system of justice and raising unprecedented questions about accountability for a former president.
Shogan’s path to confirmation could be rocky as Republicans demand more information from the Justice Department. It was the National Archives that set the probe in motion earlier this year with a referral to the FBI after Trump returned 15 boxes of documents that contained dozens of records with classified markings.
GOP Sen. Rick Scott, a member of the panel vetting Shogan’s nomination, told Bloomberg he “absolutely will demand answers” about the FBI search as part of her confirmation hearing Wednesday. Other panelists, like Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, have chastised Attorney General Merrick Garland over the investigation and questioned the administration's motives.
It's a contentious backdrop for an archivist nomination, a position often filled by academics and historians that typically moves through the Senate with little fanfare.
“It’s my understanding that it’s never been a political issue before and it’s not a partisan job,” said Sen. Rob Portman of Ohio, one of the Republicans on the Senate...