Trump’s Latest Revenge Fantasy: Purge the National Archives

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maga-purge-nara.jpg Former President Donald Trump Holds Rally In Florence, Arizona - Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images
maga-purge-nara.jpg Former President Donald Trump Holds Rally In Florence, Arizona - Credit: Mario Tama/Getty Images

Donald Trump has identified yet another federal institution he wants to purge of qualified officials and stack with his lackeys: the National Archives.

Since this summer, Trump has told close associates that he wants to gut the nonpartisan historical agency, which the former president believes is full of anti-MAGA subversives, two sources with knowledge of the matter tell Rolling Stone. Trump has said he plans to make it a priority if he wins a second term, the sources say.

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In some of these conversations, the former president has referenced specific officials — all installed during Democratic administrations — who he’d want to immediately “get rid of” and have replaced with pliable loyalists. One of these sources says that it was clear from the conversation that someone in Trump’s orbit had been slipping him names or lists of potential targets.

In other instances, the ex-president has also casually solicited recommendations for conservatives to install at the National Archives and Records Administration, including for the top post of archivist. At least one Trump confidant threw out John Solomon, a Trump ally and conservative journalist, as an apparently serious suggestion, one of the people with knowledge of this matter says.

A Trump spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on this story.

On Wednesday, Michael Caputo, a former Trump administration official who has stayed in touch with the ex-president, said that Trump has “not been this specific to me” in their conversations about possibly purging federal ranks. “But he’s definitely cleaning house [if elected again] and the Archives is clearly a disordered agency … All barns are better after the rats are run out,” the ex-official adds.

On Wednesday, Trump was in Miami, Florida, delivering his address to a Hispanic Leadership Conference convened by the America First Policy Institute. During his speech, the former president took repeated swipes at the Archives, claiming that the agency, which is led by 30-year NARA veteran and acting archivist Debra Steidel Wall, is a “radical left-run” entity. Coincidentally, Caputo said he happened to be with Trump at that speech, and was messaging Rolling Stone right at the very moment that Trump told attendees the National Archives is “woke and broken.”

The former president — facing multiple high-stakes federal investigations while he also simultaneously runs his 2024 shadow-campaign — has spent weeks finding new reasons to be enraged at the Archives. He and the agency are in a long-brewing standoff over his hoarding of classified documents, which culminated in the FBI’s August search of Trump’s Florida estate Mar-a-Lago, as well as the Justice Department’s ongoing criminal probe of the ex-president.

The National Archives has become another target of MAGAworld’s wrath and bitterness ever since, with the former president and his allies decrying the agency as a cog in the supposedly anti-Trump “deep state’s” machinery. But for all of Trump and Republicans’ anti-“deep state” rhetoric, Trump didn’t actually object to the existence of a deep state, per se. He merely wished to create his own, to seed his own allies in those same positions of entrenched establishment power. And that’s precisely how he’d want to torpedo and re-staff the Archives, should he get the chance to do it.

Trump’s allies have already begun their attack,  moved to paint the Archives as a den of Biden loyalists bent on concealing, rather than preserving history. A lawsuit filed by America First Legal, a nonprofit founded in part by former Trump aide and speechwriter Stephen Miller, in September asks that the Archives turn over any travel and communication records concerning Hunter Biden during Biden’s tenure as Vice President.

The suit itself — a demand for expedited processing, fee waiver, and release of records under the Freedom of Information Act — is, on the surface, similar to several lawsuits filed against federal agencies as a matter of routine. The rhetoric from Miller accompanying the filing, however, shows how conservative activists are trying to paint the Archives as a den of partisan, deep staters bent on destroying Trump.

The agency’s failure to immediately turn over the records, Miller claimed in a statement, is evidence of how NARA has “hatched an illegal intelligence plot with DOJ to persecute our 45th President.”

In the wake of the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search, The Heritage Foundation filed a similar lawsuit against NARA and the Justice Department, seeking expedited release of Archives staff’s communications with the White House, Justice Department, Trump staff, and the media. Mike Howell, the director of Heritage’s Oversight Project which filed the suit Mike Howell, also cast NARA as a deep state actor, wondering aloud if it was capable of applying the law “evenly, or if these agencies continue to stonewall our efforts while selectively leaking information to liberal media outlets to advance the narrative Merrick Garland and Joe Biden want.”

Trumpworld’s fury at the fact that low-level civil servants doing their jobs have placed Trump in legal peril comes as the MAGA movement-in-exile has turned its fury on the federal bureaucracy in general.

As Axios first reported, a handful of Trump loyalists have begun to hammer out a 2024 agenda for the former president’s hoped-for second term. The centerpiece of that agenda reportedly includes an ambitious proposal to crack down on career civil service employees and remove protections that had previously insulated them from political interference.

And as MAGA heavyweights have plot against the federal bureaucracy generally and the Archives in particular, rank and file Trump supporters have responded to the rhetoric with an altogether more disturbing form of bottom-up pressure on the agency: threats.

Like the FBI, which faced unprecedented threats to agents in the wake of the Mar-a-Lago search, Archives staff have faced increased threats and harassment as their agency finds itself drawn closer into the legal fight over Trump’s hoarding of classified documents. After Trump falsely claimed that former President Barack Obama had absconded with millions of presidential records, police near the Chicago-area home of the future Obama Library had to step up patrols following online attacks, according to The Washington Post.

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