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Rep. Jim Jordan is controversial for several reasons, but among the most notable is the Ohio Republican’s embrace of odd conspiracy theories. The far-right congressman’s weird ideas cover a broad spectrum from the FBI to election results to Covid.
But a couple of weeks ago, Jordan and Republican Rep. James Comer of Kentucky took on a new theory, claiming that the National Archives might have coordinated with Democratic officials as part of an effort to investigate Donald Trump for having improperly taken classified materials. The conservative Washington Times reported on Oct. 14:
[Jordan and Comer pressed Debra Steidel Wall, acting archivist of the U.S.] in a letter about NARA’s role ahead of the FBI’s Aug. 8 raid of Mr. Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago in search of classified documents. “Committee Republicans have learned that NARA’s actions initiated the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) criminal investigation against the former president the same day committee Democrats inquired about whether a referral to DOJ had been made,” Messrs. Comer and Jordan wrote.
The House Republicans apparently believe they’ve connected two dots: On Feb. 9, House Democrats wrote to the National Archives about their concerns regarding the boxes the former president took to Mar-a-Lago. The letter was generated by a Washington Post article that was published a couple of days earlier.
It was also on Feb. 9 when NARA contacted the Justice Department about a possible investigation into the controversy.
Ergo, Jordan and Comer concluded, there are “serious concerns” about NARA coordination with Democratic lawmakers. After all, the alternative would be that the two letters were coincidentally sent on the same day.
Yesterday, as Politico reported, the National Archives explained that the two letters were, in fact, coincidentally sent on the same day.
[T]hat timing is “entirely coincidental,” Acting National Archivist Debra Steidel Wall wrote in a letter to congressional Republicans on Tuesday. The Archives’ inspector general operates with complete independence from the broader agency, Wall said, and did not receive Maloney’s letter, which was directed to the Archivist. “At no time and under no circumstances were NARA officials pressured or influenced by Committee Democrats or anyone else,” Wall wrote.
Or put another way, the accusations from Jordan and Comer are not rooted in fact, and there is no competing evidence aside from a coincidence on the calendar.
Stepping back, it’s also worth noting just how frequently the National Archives — a nonpartisan, apolitical agency that has nothing to contribute to assorted fights between partisans — has had to weigh in recently in response to bogus Republican claims.
Last month, for example, Donald Trump insisted that Barack Obama had kept classified documents after leaving the White House. A day later, NARA issued a written statement, making clear that the Republican was brazenly lying. (Trump, incidentally, continued to push the claim anyway, even after it was discredited.)
As regular readers might recall, the former president made related claims soon after about other former presidents and their handing of official materials, leading the Archives to once again set the record straight and explain that Trump had no idea what he was talking about.
Now, NARA is once again rejecting provocative GOP claims, and it’s hard not to wonder whether archivists would like Republicans to simply focus their attention elsewhere.