Trump removes National Archives head after previous tangles with agency

Zoe Tillman, Bloomberg News on Feb 7, 2025

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WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is removing the head of the National Archives and Records Administration, according to his chief of personnel, and will select his own nominee to lead an agency that serves as the steward of White House records, among other things.

“The Archivist of the United States has been dismissed tonight. We thank Colleen Shogan for her service,” said Sergio Gor, the presidential personnel office director, in a post on X late Friday.

Trump was repeatedly at odds with the Archives after he left the White House in 2021. Archivist Colleen Shogan, who was nominated by President Joe Biden, didn’t lead the agency during those disputes, but the decision to replace her is widely seen as an effort by Trump to clear the U.S. government of officials who hadn’t been vetted by his advisers.

Shortly before his inauguration, Trump said in an interview that he would choose a new archivist. The agency’s head doesn’t serve a fixed term. The last Senate-confirmed official, David Ferriero, served in the role for more than a dozen years under Presidents Barack Obama, Trump and Biden. He left in April 2022 and Debra Steidel Wall served as acting head until Shogan was confirmed in May 2023.

Trump unsuccessfully sued in late 2021 to stop the Archives from providing a collection of his White House records to a special congressional committee that investigated efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol as lawmakers met to certify the results.

The federal criminal case against Trump accusing him of illegally keeping classified documents after his first term in office and of obstructing efforts by U.S. officials to get the records back stemmed from his dealings with the National Archives.

The National Archives maintains presidential records, and officials had spent months trying to get Trump to return documents that they believed he wrongly took from the White House after his first term ended, according to court papers. After officials retrieved 15 boxes from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in early 2022, they discovered documents with classification markings and alerted the Justice Department, which opened a criminal investigation.

The FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago later that year, and a federal grand jury indicted Trump in the summer of 2023.

The case never went to trial. U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed the indictment last July after determining that Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith’s appointment and his office’s funding source were unconstitutional. Prosecutors were appealing that ruling when Trump won reelection in November.

Smith dropped the appeal against Trump several weeks later, citing longstanding Justice Department policy against prosecuting sitting presidents.

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(Bloomberg staff writer Josh Wingrove contributed to this story.)