Trump Is Trying to Take Control of Congress Through Its Library

Last week, the Trump administration attempted to fire the librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, before the end of her 10-year term — and today, Trump moved to install Todd Blanche as interim director of the Library of Congress. Blanche, who’s currently serving as a U.S. deputy attorney general, is best known for representing Trump during his New York hush-money trial, in which the president was convicted on all counts.

Today, current interim director Robert Newlen wrote to staff that Blanche’s appointment has not been recognized. “Congress is engaged with the White House and we have not received direction from Congress about how to move forward,” Newlen wrote in an internal email obtained by Politico.

Over the weekend, the administration also removed Shira Perlmutter, head of the U.S. Copyright Office, days after the agency issued a report clarifying that tech companies’ efforts to train AI models on data scraped from public websites could run afoul of American copyright law and the intellectual-property rights of the data’s original creators.

It is disputed what legality, if any, there is for Trump’s ongoing power grab at the Library of Congress. According to two sources familiar with the matter, even before the internal message was sent, library staff were told by superiors this morning to refrain from recognizing Trump’s new pick at this time, describing the power grab as possibly illegal.

The expert on the Library of Congress says Perlmutter’s firing may be illegal — and more emphatically, that Trump “cannot name an acting librarian of Congress, because it’s not an executive-branch agency.”

“Inside the Library of Congress, they’re all congressional staff, and congressional staff are protected under the speech or debate clause in the Constitution,” adds the expert, whom Rolling Stone agreed not to name.

“This is going in the inviolate congressional space to access their information,” the expert says. “We know that when Trump and the DOGE people have gone elsewhere, the first thing done is they exfiltrated their data. How can a member of Congress ask CRS for legal advice or other advice when the administration can get their hands on it — or they can direct the answer?”