As President Trump goes after the institutions and offices designed to hold him in check, nothing is safe from his administration’s rampage through the federal government — not even the nonpolitical, nonpartisan National Archives and Records Administration.
The National Archives (NARA) has been a primary target of Trump’s retribution tour, having been at the center of the criminal case against Trump for his alleged mishandling of classified documents when he left office in 2021. When he returned to the White House in January 2025, he wasted little time in purging NARA’s top leadership to make room for loyal officials more likely to do his bidding — or even to turn a blind eye to future legal violations, including of the Presidential Records Act. At stake isn’t just the preservation of government documents, but also our nation’s historical record remaining free from partisan political interference.
Authoritarianism depends on secrecy and thrives on misinformation. Public access to information and the historical record is a cornerstone of a healthy democracy, and NARA ensures that executive branch actions are documented and eventually made available to the public, as required by laws like the Presidential Records Act and the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). Under the Presidential Records Act (PRA) — passed by Congress in 1978 in response to the Watergate scandal, when President Nixon had refused to turn over his secret tapes — presidential records do not personally belong to the president, but rather are public records that the American people can access.
NARA also plans for the transfer of legal custody of those records at the end of an administration. It was this responsibility that spurred the agency’s efforts to retrieve records Trump had taken with him at the end of his first term — and put the agency in his crosshairs. Throughout his first term, Trump and his administration had routinely exhibited a disdain for record-keeping requirements, from ripping up or destroying documents to conducting official work over private email. In January 2022, after a drawn-out push for Trump to return the records, NARA retrieved 15 boxes from Mar-a-Lago, including highly classified material placed among things like dinner menus.
Believing that more materials remained unaccounted for, NARA’s inspector general referred the matter to the Justice Department. Instead of tapping nonpolitical lawyers or historians to negotiate with the agency about things like presidential privilege, as previous presidents had done, Trump tapped Kash Patel and John Solomon as his representatives. Patel, a loyalist who rose through the ranks of the Trump administration and has promoted conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, was confirmed in February 2025 as director of the FBI. Solomon, a conservative commentator, had played a role in the disinformation campaign about the Bidens and Ukraine. In August 2022, an FBI search of Mar-a-Lago turned up documents labeled top secret, unleashing a far-right backlash of threats against the FBI and NARA, with Patel claiming that Trump had declassified all the documents before leaving office and that the search was a cover-up of information about “Russia Gate.”
The Justice Department’s investigation led to the June 2023 indictment of Trump, with the former president facing more than 30 charges of violations of the Espionage Act for his allegedly having mishandled classified records and blocked efforts by the government to retrieve them. But the next year, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon handed Trump a major win when she dismissed the case, ruling that Special Counsel Jack Smith had been illegally appointed. During Trump’s first week back in office, Cannon, a Trump appointee, also barred the Justice Department from releasing Volume Two of Smith’s report, which detailed the findings from the criminal investigation.
In February 2025, American Oversight sued the Justice Department, demanding the release of Volume Two of the report under FOIA. The organization also submitted a motion in the (now-defunct) criminal case against Trump, asking Cannon to confirm that her gag order had expired when the remaining charges were dismissed by the Justice Department, or to lift the order. Cannon rejected the request, despite the report potentially containing critical information about Patel, whose Senate confirmation was imminent, but our legal actions remain ongoing.
Meanwhile, Trump’s promised retribution against the National Archives was in full swing. On Feb. 7, he fired Archivist Colleen Shogan, who said no cause or reason had been given. The deputy archivist, William Bosanko, who had worked at NARA for more than 30 years, stepped down a week later. Also out was NARA’s inspector general, adding to the growing list of independent agency watchdogs purged by Trump. The senior staff were reportedly pushed out by Jim Byron, a White House appointee and the president of the Richard Nixon Foundation. Earlier in the month, Trump had named Secretary of State Marco Rubio as the agency’s temporary head; Trump said after the shake-up that Byron would serve as a senior adviser to Rubio and would “manage the National Archives on a day-to-day basis” while the administration searched for a full-time archivist, with some media speculation pointing to Solomon.
While overhauling NARA itself, the second Trump administration quickly began to raid the public record as it wreaked havoc on the federal government. Health information and datasets, particularly related to vulnerable groups, were removed from the CDC’s website. As Trump and Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency callously dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, the agency’s website was taken down with no notice, prompting American Oversight to issue letters to Rubio and NARA warning about potential violations of the Federal Records Act. The organization issued similar warnings about valuable data being lost amid the attack on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Beyond the loss of vital information, the politicization of an organization tasked with maintaining our collective memory — by a president who has regularly signaled his contempt for both facts and the rule of law — presents a fundamental danger to our democracy. An agency led by loyalists more devoted to maintaining the president’s power than to preserving the truth is one more likely to turn a blind eye to future violations. Historical events like the insurrection of Jan. 6, 2021, are at risk of being subject to historical revisionism by an administration that has made whitewashing history a core part of its education priorities. Within the first month of Trump’s term, the Justice Department had already removed a public database of criminal cases related to the attack on the Capitol and the attempt to overturn the 2020 election.
As a guardian of government transparency, the National Archives and Records Administration ensures the electorate has access to a recorded history that is free of political or partisan meddling so that it can hold the government accountable to the people. “In a democracy, we rely upon transparency, we rely upon accountability of our officials,” said Shogan in September 2024. “And records are one way we hold our elected officials and hold our government accountable.” Our records belong to us — not the president — and protecting the independence and functioning of the National Archives is a core part of preserving our history. At stake is not just the safety of our records, but our democracy.
