GOP raises Mar-a-Lago search at Archives nominee's hearing
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the National Archives faced unusual scrutiny at her confirmation hearing Wednesday over the agency’s role in the investigation into sensitive documents seized at Donald Trump’s Florida home. Republicans were quick to bring up the matter.
”It wasn’t just the FBI carrying out the raid but it was requested by the National Archives to be able to engage with these records and that triggered something with the FBI," Sen. James Lankford, R-Okla., told nominee Colleen Shogan.
She responded by saying she has not been briefed on the details of investigation. “So I have no information about those decisions or the sequence of events,” Shogan said.
Her path to confirmation turned rocky as the GOP continues to demand more information about the FBI search last month of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort.
“We are living through the political weaponization of the National Archives, the political weaponization of the Department of Justice, the political weaponization of the FBI,” Sen. Josh Hawley, a Missouri Republican, said in his questioning of Shogan.
Hawley and Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, both latched on to an academic article Shogan wrote in 2007 about Republican anti-intellectualism to question her ability to be a nonpartisan face of the Archives at this time. Shogan, a political scientist, pointed to her decades of service at nonpartisan agencies like the Library of Congress and White House Historical Association.
The nation’s record-keeping agency set the probe into the former president 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.
The investigation sets a contentious backdrop for a position that's often filled by academics...