TOPEKA, Kan. — The new National Archives leader whose nomination was swept into the partisan furor over the criminal documents-hoarding case against ex-President Donald Trump says she is preparing the agency that’s responsible for preserving historical records for an expected flood of digital documents.
Colleen Shogan, a political scientist with deep Washington ties, says the spotlight on the Archives during the past year shows that Americans are invested in preserving historical materials. After events in Kansas on Wednesday, she reiterated that she had no role in decisions made when the Trump investigation began and said the Archives depends upon the White House to deliver documents when a president leaves office.
“It provides an opportunity for us to discuss, quite frankly, why records are important,” Shogan said. “What we’re seeing is that Americans care about records. They want to have access to the records.”
Shogan was in the Midwest this week for visits to two presidential libraries. She went Wednesday to Dwight Eisenhower’s library in the small town of Abilene on the rolling Kansas prairie, and on Thursday to Harry Truman’s library in Independence, Mo., in the Kansas City area.
The Archives is the custodian of cherished documents such as the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, but also billions of pages of other records and millions of maps, charts, photographs and films. An order from President Joe Biden will require U.S. government agencies — but not the White House — to provide their records to the Archives in a digital format starting at the end of June 2024.
“We are responsible for the preservation of those records and the storage of those records, but also sharing those records with the American people,” Shogan said in an interview by Google Meet from the Eisenhower library. “That’s a large task, and it’s not getting any smaller, obviously.”
Biden nominated Shogan as archivist last year, but the U.S. Senate did not confirm her appointment until May. She was then an executive at the White House Historical Association, having served under both the Trump and Biden administrations. Before that, she worked at the Congressional Research Service, which provides nonpartisan analysis for lawmakers and their staff.
While the Archives generally has been staid and low-key, Shogan’s nomination was not the first to create a stir. In 1995, then-President Bill Clinton picked former two-term Kansas Gov. John Carlin, a fellow Democrat, and the leaders of three groups of historians opposed the appointment, questioning whether he was qualified. Carlin held the post for a decade, and an archivists’ society honored him near the end of his tenure.
But Biden nominated Shogan amid an investigation of Trump’s handling of sensitive documents after he left office, which led to dozens of federal felony charges against the former president in Florida, home to his Mar-a-Lago estate. On Thursday, his valet pleaded not guilty to new charges in that case.
The Archives set the investigation in motion with a referral to the FBI after Trump returned 15 boxes of documents that contained dozens of records with classified markings.
