President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) failed to make it out of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee on Wednesday amid the controversy surrounding the FBI’s raid on Mar-a-Lago.
Republican senators focused on the Mar-a-Lago raid during Colleen Shogan’s testimony last Wednesday.
Although former President Donald Trump voluntarily complied with a grand jury subpoena that sought the return of documents kept at Mar-a-Lago, the FBI raided Trump’s estate after NARA asked the U.S. Department of Justice to continue the investigation into Trump.
However, Shogan told the committee she has “not been briefed on any of the details” of NARA’s or the DOJ’s investigation into Trump.
Shogan told Sen. James Lankford (R-OK):
I want to be clear that as the nominee for this position, I have not been briefed on any of the details. But as I understand it, when there is some concern about damage to records in general at the National Archives, at that point in time, to retrieve the records, there is a voluntary exchange of communication with those individuals. And as I understand that, once again, they don’t have any past knowledge of this.
The committee’s vote was tied 7-7 along party lines.
With the deadlocked vote, Democrat Senate Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) will have to discharge the nomination out of the committee, which would delay her vote before the full U.S. Senate.
Ranking member Rob Portman (R-OH) also painted Shogan as partisan for a 2007 article in which she wrote, “Republicans tend to exhibit anti-intellectual qualities.”
However, Shogan cited her “15 years of nonpartisan government” experience and claimed Sen. Portman was taking her article out of context.
Jordan Dixon-Hamilton is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at jdixonhamilton@breitbart.com or follow him on Twitter.
