White Magic at the National Archives? Post-January 20 AoS Chronicle No. 1

A back-pages story may become lots more important than you suppose.

A few days ago, on February 6, Jonathan V. Last, the erstwhile editor of The Bulwark, wrote an essay entitled “The Story of Us” about what looked to be the early stages of the Trump Administration trying to seize political control of the National Archives and Records Administration. Amid the torrent of attempted coup-related news these past few weeks you might have missed this short-of-front-page news item.

Last admitted that the evidence for the Archives putsch was mixed, since the White House announcement that Secretary of State Marco Rubio would be put in charge of the Archives as Acting Director clashed with the fact that the current Archivist, Dr. Colleen J. Shogan, was still in the saddle on the morning of February 4, and no one over there on Adelphi Road in College Park had heard anything about the coming of Rubio. Things have since become clearer: Dr. Shogan was dismissed on February 7

“The Story of Us” is excellent background on this still-a-moving-target subject, bringing into sharp focus a skein of critical data points in the story going back to 2022, including several from the 2024 campaign, and bringing the tale up to date as far as was then possible based on publicly available sources. From digesting those data points two things become clear, the second a good bit more bone-chilling than the first.

First, Trump’s vendetta against his perceived enemies is behind his plot to politically suborn the National Archives, for he thinks that the Mar-a-Lago purloined secret documents indictment owes much to “snitches” at the Archives informing the FBI of his misdeeds.