Background Reviews of Top Officials Support Allegations of Bias at National Archives

The National Archives building in Washington, on July 21, 2007. (Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images)

News Analysis

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.

In his Jan. 10 letter to Acting Archivist Debra Steidel Wall, House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer (R-Ky.) said he was “investigating whether there is a political bias” at her agency.

In the leadup to the letter, Biden’s lawyer, Richard Sauber, had just dropped a bombshell on Washington: Officials at NARA and the Department of Justice (DOJ) had known for more than two months about Biden’s retention of classified documents from his vice presidency in a number of locations.

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 October 2022, just weeks before Biden’s team reportedly located the documents from his vice presidency in an office in Washington, NARA had asserted that any claims that Obama–Biden documents had been improperly held were “false and misleading.”

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.”

An aerial view of Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort home in Florida. (Steve Helber/AP Photo)

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 first part of this investigation outlines what we know about some key personnel now leading, or slated to lead, the National Archives.

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.

Stern’s path to the capital began at Vassar College in New York state, where he enjoyed rock climbing and studied ancient Greek. He graduated in 1983 before going on to Yale Law School.

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.

Stern repeatedly appears on the masthead of a byline-free campus newspaper, Unscrewed.

In its initial October 1976 issue, Unscrewed' called itself “a comprehensive, intelligent, and un-biased consumer report on the Vassar community and its surrounding environment.”

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.

An editorial in Vassar’s conservative newspaper, The Vassar Spectator, claimed that the paper’s staff injected “liberal, if not radical views” into a publication ostensibly meant to inform ordinary student consumers on campus.

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.

The previous month, Stern had written a letter to Vassar’s Miscellany News lambasting the successful campaign against the then-upcoming NYPIRG’s referendum.

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.”

Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev (L) and U.S. President Ronald Reagan sign a treaty on Dec. 8, 1987, at the Washington summit, eliminating U.S. and Soviet intermediate-range and shorter-range nuke missiles. (-/AFP via Getty Images)

It’s hard to imagine that Stern warmed to Reagan after graduating from Yale Law School and joining the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).

Indeed, as he pointed out in a Vanguard Law Magazine article from several years ago, Stern was with the ACLU during its landmark lawsuit against the Reagan administration, Armstrong v. Executive Office of the President.

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.

The D.C. Court of Appeals rejected that argument, ruling in 1993 that those printouts “may omit fundamental pieces of information,” including “the identity of the sender and/or recipient and the time of receipt.”

Yet, in a 1996 decision, the same court overturned the earlier conclusion about the National Security Council. It found that the council’s records were not subject to the Federal Records Act, meaning the council could destroy its emails.

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.

President Barack Obama signs the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act alongside members of Congress, the administration and Vice President Joe Biden at the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington on July 21, 2010. (Photo ROD LAMKEY JR/AFP/Getty Images)

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.

The House Oversight Committee’s then-top Republican, Darrell Issa of California, alleged that the body handled money poorly and employed staff closely tied to partisan Democratic politics.

The D.C. Appeals Court sided with NARA in jettisoning a Cause of Action lawsuit seeking access to the commission’s records.

NARA argued, among other things, that those documents were “legislative in character, and thus outside the reach of FOIA.”

Under the Obama administration, NARA had also pursued a new “Capstone Approach“ to records management. They aimed to streamline and maximize the retention of ”permanently valuable email of federal agencies.”

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.

As Cause of Action’s executive director during the Obama administration, Epstein testified before the Senate in 2015 that NARA had pushed back against his organization’s attempts to obtain documents related to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s private email server.

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks about her use of a private email account at the United Nations on March 10 in New York City. The Clinton Foundation allegedly accepted $2 million in 2013 from a business tied to the Chinese regime. (Yana Paskova/Getty Images)

Emails from as early as 2012 obtained through FOIA requests by Cause of Action show concern among those at NARA about how Clinton handled records.

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.

In early 2022, for example, a broad coalition of groups focused on government transparency wrote to the Biden Justice Department asking for a clarification of its interpretation of FOIA. That letter said noncompliance from the government is “at a decade-long high,” judging by the amount of active FOIA litigation.

Attorney General Merrick Garland issued FOIA guidelines the following month.

The Biden administration’s opacity “became immediately apparent upon their taking power,” Rubinstein said.

In August 2022, America First Legal made a series of FOIA requests to NARA. They wanted crucial records from Biden’s vice presidency, including any communications with his son Hunter and his brother James.

NARA denied expedited processing of the requests, prompting the firm to sue the agency the following month.

America First Legal also issued a FOIA request to NARA for documents related to the Mar-a-Lago search.

The U.S. National Archives building in Washington on Oct. 26, 2017. (Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

The agency is slowly releasing records in response to the many FOIA requests it has received.

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 timing and the process are exceedingly strange and highly suggestive of damage control,” he said, speculating that the differences could boil down to politics.

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.

In a memorandum made public under FOIA, Wall wrote that “the National Archives has been the focus of intense scrutiny for months, this week especially, with many people ascribing political motivation to our actions.”

“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?

Debra Steidel Wall. (National Archives and Records Administration)

The official described some of her earliest ambitions in a 2011 article in The Suffolk Times. It was written shortly after she was appointed deputy archivist of the United States under Obama.

“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.

The words “feminism” or “feminist” appear 40 times in Debra Eve Steidel’s dissertation, “That Her Soul May Remain Pure: Women in American Silent Film.”

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.

Headshot portrait of Margaret Sanger (1883–1966), American social activist and founder of Planned Parenthood, circa 1945. (Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

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.

In a 2011 address to a meeting of government archivists, Wall said her agency was “facing [its] own funding struggles,” citing Congress’s conflict with Obama over the debt ceiling.

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.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt seated in front of a number of television and radio station microphones in Washington, on Oct. 14, 1938. (Fotosearch/Getty Images)

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.

Elton Ensor, veteran of World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington in 2008. (YASMEEN GHOLMIEH/AFP/Getty Images)

The album cover is an image of a bust of Ho Chi Minh, flanked by a golden star and, on the left, a golden hammer and sickle.

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.

Federal Election Commission (FEC) records show that Shogan, now senior vice president of the White House Historical Association, has been a prolific donor to Democrats and associated causes, including Hillary Clinton’s 2008 and 2016 presidential campaigns, Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign, and the Democratic donation tool ActBlue.

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.

A 2005 article co-authored with Joyce Gelb referred to pro-life activism as “anti-choice.”

Confrontation between pro-life supporters and pro-abortion protesters in Washington on June 26, 2022. (Nathan Worcester/The Epoch Times)

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.

Some of the most glaring examples appeared in her 2007 paper “Anti-Intellectualism in the Modern Presidency: A Republican Populism.”

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 this image taken from a video, Colleen Shogan, nominee for U.S. archivist, speaks in Washington on Sept. 21, 2022. (Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee via The Epoch Times)

“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.”

The hearing deadlocked in a 7–7 vote along party lines. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) can now move to discharge Shogan’s nomination, much as he did with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s nomination to serve on the Supreme Court.

‘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.

A search of FEC individual contribution data from 2022 shows that people with an employer title that included “National Archives” almost uniformly backed Democrats and left-wing causes.

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.

The American Library Association, the world’s oldest and biggest library association, is led by self-described “Marxist lesbian” Emily Drabinski, whose major publications include “Queering the Catalog.”

Athena Kills (C) and Scalene Onixxx arrive for Drag Queen Story Hour to an audience of adults and children at Cellar Door Books in Riverside, Calif. on June 22, 2019. (Frederic J. Brown/AFP/Getty Images)

Many of America’s public libraries have eagerly hosted drag queen story hour events. By contrast, pastor story hours have met with more resistance, as reported by The Epoch Times.

Megan Fox (the journalist, not the actress) has long documented evidence of left-wing bias in America’s public libraries.

In 2016, she and Kevin DuJan published “Shut Up!: The Bizarre War that One Public Library Waged Against the First Amendment,” which chronicles her battle with the Orland Park Public Library, in part over what she saw as its resistance to transparency.

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.

“Every institution is compromised,” she said.

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.

Copies of George Orwell’s novels “1984” and "Animal Farm" on a table in New York on Feb. 26, 2021. (Chung I Ho/The Epoch Times)

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.