There are all kinds of government officials who should be replaced, and Donald Trump as president will have the power to fire them. Archivist of the United States Colleen Shogan should not be one of them.
When asked by Hugh Hewitt on Monday, Trump said, “We will have a new archivist.” Hewitt was asking in the context of the now-abandoned classified documents case against Trump. It’s understandable why Trump is upset by what he views as a politically motivated investigation conducted by his political opponents, but Shogan was not part of the prosecution.
Presidential documents legally belong to the National Archives after a president leaves office, so the classified-documents investigation necessarily involved requests to the National Archives. Shogan promised transparency with federal authorities when the investigation was happening. That was the proper position for her apolitical position. The National Archives also turned over records to House Republicans last year when they were investigating Joe Biden’s tenure as vice president.
Shogan has been excellent at standing up to the radical Left during her tenure as archivist. When two left-wing climate-activist vandals defaced the cases holding the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution in Washington, D.C., last year, Shogan urged prosecutors to charge them with felonies instead of misdemeanors.
“The National Archives Rotunda is the sanctuary for our nation’s founding documents,” Shogan said in March. “They are here for all Americans to view and understand the principles of our nation. We take such vandalism very seriously and we will insist that the perpetrators be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.”
She then testified at the sentencing hearing for one of them in November, urging the judge to give them the maximum sentence of ten years in prison. “Anything less sends the wrong message to Americans about the rule of law, our system of government, and the principles which enable its peaceful continuity,” she said.
The judge ended up giving one 18 months and the other 24 months in prison while ordering them to pay the full cost of the clean-up efforts. “While I would have liked to see a longer sentence handed down, I am glad that the judge agreed that a strong message was needed to reflect the significance of these crimes and hopefully deter future attacks for the National Archives, and all cultural institutions across the country,” Shogan said of the sentencing. And they probably would have gotten away with misdemeanors had it not been for her sustained intervention.
Shogan’s insistence on law and order doesn’t stop with physical vandalism. She has also stood up to the Left’s attempts at constitutional vandalism by making clear that the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) is not eligible for ratification because its deadline has passed. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand (D., N.Y.) has been leading a campaign to have the archivist ignore Congress’s ratification deadline and enshrine the ERA in the Constitution based on post-deadline “ratifications” by state-level Democrats.
Shogan and deputy archivist William Bosanko made clear in a statement last month that the ERA “cannot be certified as part of the Constitution due to established legal, judicial, and procedural decisions.” This is in accordance with years of sound reasoning by legal experts from across the political spectrum, including supporters of the ERA such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
Shogan’s predecessor as archivist, David Ferriero, formed a task force in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests that issued a report saying that the National Archives Building is an example of “structural racism” because it “lauds wealthy White men in the nation’s founding while marginalizing BIPOC [Black, Indigenous and other People of Color], women, and other communities.” The report also called for “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” at the National Archives. For seeking to undo left-wing bias at the archives, Shogan has been smeared as trying to whitewash American history by left-leaning historians, and congressional Democrats accused her of “censorship.”
The archivist’s job is nonpartisan. The term is not fixed in length, and archivists frequently span multiple presidential administrations, retiring of their own accord. Colleen Shogan has a solid record of standing up to the radical Left in defense of American institutions and history. That’s exactly the right kind of person to lead the National Archives, and Trump shouldn’t take out his justified anger against lawfare by firing her.