Amid the fallout from the discovery of classified documents at President Joe Biden’s former office at the Penn Biden Center think tank in Washington and at his Delaware residence, Republican lawmakers are taking a look at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) for potential bias.
The formal keeper of the federal government’s records was already facing scrutiny for its connection to the August 2022 FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, the personal residence of former President Donald Trump. A NARA referral to the Justice Department ultimately led to that search.
With a newly regained majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, Republicans are signaling that they will use their oversight powers to focus on NARA, where the acting head, the top attorney, and the nominee for the top post have a history of alignment with liberal ideology.
Yet the public wasn’t informed until January, long after midterm elections in which Republicans narrowly took the House and failed to gain an edge in the Senate.
In the eyes of many Republicans, the archives’ recent actions are at odds with how it treated the discovery of Trump-era documents.
“The National Archives has taken a much more accommodating approach to then-Vice President Joe Biden’s stolen classified records, at multiple unguarded locations, than they did with former President Donald Trump’s lawfully taken and possessed records at Mar-a-Lago,” Mike Davis, a former chief counsel for nominations to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley who now leads the Article III Project, said in a Jan. 17 interview with The Epoch Times.
Comer wrote in his letter to Wall that “NARA’s inconsistent treatment of recovering classified records held by former President Trump and President Biden raises questions about political bias at the agency.”
Questions come easily. But does the evidence offer any answers?
An investigation by The Epoch Times found NARA’s leaders have long championed the left-wing and partisan Democratic views pervasive in Washington and its wealthy suburbs.
The evidence leaves open the possibility of partisan influence on agency discretion and, more generally, a turn away from transparency under Biden.
Personnel, they say, is policy.
The Agency Lawyer
Comer, in his letter to Wall, asked her to arrange an interview with NARA’s general counsel, Gary Stern, and committee staff by Jan. 17. An Oversight Committee aide told The Epoch Times on Jan. 18 that NARA had responded.NARA didn’t, however, respond to questions from The Epoch Times about that interview. Indeed, no one from the archives replied to multiple The Epoch Times’ emails about this article, except through automated emails confirming receipt of particular messages.
Serving as general counsel since 1998, Stern would have been at the heart of legal decision-making in both the Trump and Biden classified documents cases.
Voting records show he is a registered Democrat. Yet, in Washington, Stern’s name commands respect on both sides of the aisle.
Those who spoke with The Epoch Times described Stern as smart, disciplined, and professional—not the sort to go rogue in the elite institutions where he has often thrived.
A study of Vassar’s newspaper archives suggests young Stern was engaged in left-wing activism, sometimes under the auspices of a more neutral (or formerly neutral) institution.
By April 1983, however, its mission seems to have drifted. It called itself an “intelligent political and consumer report.” One long article in that issue challenged President Ronald Reagan’s policy on Guatemala.
“They basically wrote to themselves,” said a government lawyer in a Jan. 11 interview with The Epoch Times. The lawyer, a Vassar student at the time, asked to remain anonymous because his job doesn’t allow him to speak with the press.
The anonymous former student believes the group used consumer advocacy as a pretense to advance far-left views.
Stern also battled campus conservatives as a member of the New York Public Interest Research Group (NYPIRG), a nonprofit co-founded by Ralph Nader.
In March 1980, the student body voted on a referendum that would have made students pay a $2 activity fee to NYPIRG unless they opted out. It failed.
In it, he characterized a conservative student organization, Young Americans for Freedom, as a “right-wing national organization, fully supportive of Ronald Reagan, Nuclear Power and Military Aggression.”
It’s hard to imagine that Stern warmed to Reagan after graduating from Yale Law School and joining the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The Executive Office of the President and the National Security Council had maintained that they could destroy electronic records without violating the Federal Records Act, just so long as they had printouts of the material.
Some worry that Stern’s zeal to make records public waxes when a Republican is in the Oval Office and wanes under a Democrat chief executive.
During the Obama administration, for example, Stern labored mightily to protect Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission records from Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests by Cause of Action, a conservative legal group.
Cause of Action wanted to get to the bottom of the Dodd–Frank Act, a piece of legislation championed by President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats over the objections of Republicans. It created the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.
NARA argued, among other things, that those documents were “legislative in character, and thus outside the reach of FOIA.”
That emphasis on electronic records could raise questions about the true importance of physical records held by Trump.
“There is a concern that, without records management having a level of political accountability, it gets implemented in ways that may appear politically biased,” said Daniel Z. Epstein, a professor of administrative law at St. Thomas University in Florida.
Epstein spoke with The Epoch Times in a Jan. 15 interview.
Reed Rubinstein, a Trump administration alum who now leads oversight and investigations for Stephen Miller’s America First Legal, told The Epoch Times in a Jan. 16 interview that the Biden administration hasn’t been a model of transparency.
The Biden administration’s opacity “became immediately apparent upon their taking power,” Rubinstein said.
Rubinstein questioned NARA’s referral to the DOJ.
“How can NARA make a referral when the Presidential Records Act doesn’t provide for that process?” he asked.
Rubinstein thinks there are “obvious anomalies’' in how the agency went on to treat Biden’s records.
The Acting Archivist
Debra Steidel Wall has led NARA since May 2022, after archivist and Obama appointee David S. Ferriero retired.While Wall was in charge of NARA during both the Mar-a-Lago search and the reported discovery of Biden’s classified materials in November, her predecessor still led the agency when NARA made its referral to the DOJ regarding Trump’s documents.
Ferriero didn’t respond to repeated requests for comment from The Epoch Times about the timing of his departure and whether it had anything to do with the two unfolding documents cases.
“NARA has received messages from the public accusing us of corruption and conspiring against the former President, or congratulating NARA for ‘bringing him down.’ Neither is accurate or welcome,” she wrote.
In that same document, Wall said she told Trump’s lawyer that his executive privilege claim under the Presidential Records Act had failed because “’there is no precedent for an assertion of executive privilege by a former President against an incumbent President to prevent the latter from obtaining from NARA Presidential records belonging to the Federal Government.'”
Epstein noted that NARA hasn’t engaged in federal rulemaking, which ultimately flows through the White House Office of Management and Budget, to spell out when, why, and how it would refer a presidential records case such as Trump’s to the FBI.
That’s all the more striking in light of NARA’s response in the case of Biden’s vice presidential records.
Voters cannot directly unseat the bureaucrats charged with this sort of serious decision-making. Politicians come and go, but permanent Washington remains.
“If you’re going to have a federal bureaucracy, then the presumption should be that if they’re not making decisions via public regulations, then they’re engaging in political decisions,” Epstein said.
Davis, of the Article III Project, also worries about the politicization of the archives.
We all know who Donald Trump is. But who is Debra Steidel Wall?
“When I first got here, I had no idea what the archives were. I was thinking of doing journalism or politics or something like that,” she told that publication.
A glance at Wall’s master’s thesis at American University, where she studied silent film, may offer some insights into the political perspective that motivated her.
It’s hard to miss some value judgments in the future archivist’s prose.
At the turn of the 20th century, women were, in her words, “chained to home and motherhood.”
By the 1920s, Steidel argued, a “new morality” had enabled young women to reach what she described as “sexual sophistication.”
Yet, “despite this outward emancipation, women in the twenties remained subject to the fetters of traditional morality and antiquated ideas.”
The film student also spoke in glowing terms of Margaret Sanger, co-founder of Planned Parenthood.
Sanger was “a radical Socialist and New York City slum nurse” who “balked at the ignorance and inequality perpetuated against poor women by the U.S. legal system.”
Steidel, now Wall, has alluded to politics in her NARA speeches.
Thanks in part to the Tea Party movement, Republicans had racked up a commanding majority in the House during the 2010 elections, setting up a fight over government spending.
“State and local records administrators and archivists have suffered disproportionate budget cuts far longer,” Wall said, later warning of the need for what she called “adequate public investment.”
“The pressure on our supporters on the House Appropriations Committee to simply eliminate funding for programs has never been greater, but, because of you, we are hanging in there and working for a better outcome at the end of the process.”
She also described one of NARA’s major goals as “embracing the primacy of electronic information in all facets of our work”—an interesting prelude to the fight over Trump’s paper records more than a decade later.
Wall ended the speech with a quotation from Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The acting archivist’s interests also shine through in a social media account she maintains under a pseudonym.
Photographs depict a protest over George Floyd’s death in police custody in 2020. The words “Black Lives Matter” and “No Justice, No Peace!” can be found beside more aggressively left-wing messages: “[Expletive] Blue Lives!” and “Workers Abolishing Police.”
An October 2010 photo album from Wall, from not long before she was named deputy archivist, chronicles Washington’s “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.” The event was hosted by liberal comedians Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who then presented a parody of conservative TV and talk show personalities.
One poster she photographed reads, “Tea Party: Putting the ‘Dumb’ in Freedom.”
Another lengthy album documents Obama’s presidential inauguration in 2009.
A third album, dating to the final days of Obama’s second term in January 2017, depicts a trip to Vietnam, still run by the Communist Party of Vietnam.
The Nominee
Biden’s nominee for the nation’s archivist, Colleen Shogan, has a partisan history of her own.In the mid-2000s, she worked for a moderate Democrat, former Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.), as he became a political independent.
Yet, it is the Georgetown University adjunct’s scholarship that has caught the eye of those concerned about partisanship in NARA after the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago visit.
The paper concluded that pro-life organizers did not take part in debates over abortion access at hospitals after mergers with Catholic medical institutions.
The authors speculated those activists might view it as “as too technical an issue”–one of multiple times the nominee has seemed to disparage the brainpower of conservatives in not-so-subtle terms.
One line in a section titled “Ronald Reagan: Ideologue and Anti-Intellectual” referenced that president’s “less than impressive intellectual capacities.”
During her Sept. 21 confirmation hearing before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, just weeks after the Mar-a-Lago search, Shogan repeatedly defended that language.
“I was trying to explain how certain presidents, very effectively through their rhetoric, were able to communicate with everyday Americans,” she told the committee’s ranking member, Sen. Rob Portman (R-Ohio).
“It’s a piece on rhetoric,” she told Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.)
When Hawley asked her if her piece was nonpartisan, she replied that it was an academic article more than a decade and a half old.
In that same article, Shogan claimed that Reagan’s actions in response to violence and unruly protests in California’s higher education system “made it clear that students did not attend college for the sake of learning.”
Republicans also confronted Shogan on how the article described President George W. Bush. She had written that “during the 2000 campaign, it was widely accepted that Bush was less intelligent than his challenger, Al Gore.”
“In no way, shape, or possible [sic] do I think that President Bush is inferior intellectually or less intelligent. That is not the purpose of the article. It’s not stated in the article,” she told Portman when asked about the line.
“So the quote that I have that says, ‘It was widely accepted that Bush was less intelligent than his challenger, Al Gore’—that was not your quote?” Portman asked.
Shogan murmured before replying, “That was a characterization.”
Shogan told the senators that her successful working relationship with the Trump White House while in the White House Historical Association indicated she wouldn’t lead NARA in a partisan manner.
“You’re trying to present yourself here as nonpartisan. In fact, you’re an extreme partisan, and your record shows that,” Hawley said.
Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) asked Shogan about NARA’s involvement in the process that led up to the search of Mar-a-Lago: “Should this be a voluntary cooperation rather than a legal raid with a search warrant coming into a private residence?”
She answered: “As I understand it, when there is some concern about missing or damaged records in general at NARA, at that point in time, to retrieve the records, there is a voluntary exchange of communication with those individuals. And as I understand it–and once again, I don’t have any past knowledge of this–the vast majority of the time, the records are recovered and retrieved.”
Lankford replied, “That has now set a new precedent—that going forward, this is going to be the new standard for every president after this.”
‘Every Institution Is Compromised’
It’s much easier for a journalist to scrutinize NARA’s top leadership than its rank and file.Low-level employees may not have much influence on the agency as a whole. Few, if any, are as visible to the public as Wall or Stern.
Some may wonder if left-leaning agency leaders aren’t representative of a less ideological corps of career government workers.
In truth, public data reveal little political diversity at the archives.
Raphael Warnock’s Senate campaign, the Democratic National Committee, and, of course, ActBlue all show up again and again, alongside other familiar campaigns and organizations. By contrast, the Republican donation tool WinRed and other Republican or conservative causes appear only a handful of times.
Law professor Epstein was not exactly shocked by the FEC data.
He remarked that NARA staff who support Democrats are “voting consistent with their self-interest.”
“Democrats are going to keep their salaries much higher than Republicans would,” he said.
NARA is far from the only American organization charged with large-scale record keeping in which some have perceived bias.
Megan Fox (the journalist, not the actress) has long documented evidence of left-wing bias in America’s public libraries.
In Jan. 17 messages to The Epoch Times, she said the leftward drift of libraries can be traced back to the ALA, the same powerful entity now run by an admitted Marxist.
“They are a radical organization that is pulling all the strings,” she said, adding that her book describes “how it became that way and what citizens can do to fight it.”
Fox wasn’t surprised to hear of potential partisanship in NARA.
Speak, Memory
If bias at our National Archives goes beyond the political views of the bureaucrats who staff it—if those individuals’ tendency to favor Democrats and left-wing causes influences their treatment of the executive branch—then the American people may have deeper questions about the institution’s ability to remain neutral in an increasingly politicized world.Wall once described the archives as “the nation’s records keeper—in effect, our national memory.”
Its museum in Washington houses the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.
In George Orwell’s dystopian novel “1984,” O'Brien paints a grim picture of just how much control a tightly managed party could exercise over information:
“We, the Party, control all records, and we control all memories. Then we control the past, do we not?”
The year 2023 isn’t “1984.” Yet for many Americans outside the Party, it may seem like the gap is narrowing.
