Hawley accuses Biden nominee of lying under oath about her political social media posts

Sen. Josh Hawley attacked President Joe Biden’s nominee to lead the National Archives on Tuesday over her social media posts, including a tweet criticizing Republican efforts to block the certification of Biden’s electoral victory a day before the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot, and accused her of lying under oath.

The nominee, Colleen Shogan, sat quietly as Hawley interrogated her for nearly 8 minutes during a confirmation hearing in the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. She answered repeatedly that “my social media is in my personal capacity” in response to questions from Hawley.

Shogan is a novelist and a senior vice president at the White House Historical Association. She would be the first woman to hold the position of archivist of the United States if confirmed, though women have served in the role in an acting capacity.

Hawley, a Missouri Republican, called Shogan’s posts “pretty disturbing” and accused her of lying after she had previously told the committee that her posts on Twitter were “comprised of posts about my mystery novels, events at the White House Historical Association, Pittsburgh sports teams, travels and my dog.”

The line of questioning reflected an attempt by Hawley to build a case that Shogan lied under oath by contrasting descriptions of her past tweets against her previous description of her social media presence. Effectively, Hawley sought to use the fact that she didn’t explicitly mention she had sent political tweets against her.

“What about the post on Jan. 5 of 2021, in which you say that Ted Cruz ought to stay in his own lane and not worry about what’s going on in Pittsburgh – this is in reference, I think, to questions he had about the certification of the certification of the last election,” Hawley said. “Is that a post about your dog or sports teams or mystery novels?”

Cruz was among the senators, along with Hawley, who objected to certification of Biden’s victory.

In December 2020, Hawley was the first senator to announce he would object to the certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory and singled out Pennsylvania, Shogan’s home state. Hawley, who raised his fist to the crowd gathering outside the Capitol before the insurrection on Jan. 6, then voted to object to Pennsylvania’s results after the mob was cleared from the building.

Hawley used his questioning of Shogan on Tuesday to highlight posts about the religious displays on public grounds and mask mandates for children.

“This is the most extraordinary thing I have seen in my brief time in the Senate. I have never seen a witness blatantly lie under oath like Dr. Shogan has just done to this committee, stonewalled this committee and just repeatedly refused to answer my questions about her own posts that are in public,” Hawley said.

Hawley said he will oppose Shogan’s nomination. Hawley has opposed more Biden nominees than any other senator.

Biden nominated Shogan in August days before the FBI searched former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home for classified records. The search has drawn additional attention to Shogan’s nomination as it has become clear the FBI conducted the search after months of the National Archives seeking records it believed Trump hadn’t turned over despite a legal requirement to do so.

“I think she’s an ideal leader for really such a time as this is,” Stewart McLaurin, president of the White House Historical Association and Shogan’s boss, told the Associated Press in September. “I am not aware of a partisan bone in her body.”

In an earlier nomination hearing for Shogan last year, Hawley challenged her on an academic paper she wrote in 2007 titled “Anti-Intellectualism in the Modern Presidency: A Republican Problem.”

In it, she wrote that Republican presidents adopted anti-intellectual rhetoric to disarm their critics and endear them with voters. She highlighted Dwight Eisenhower, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Shogan’s article had a sentence saying anti-intellectualism is not the same as stupidity, but is instead an anti-elitism.

“Listen, she didn’t get a single Republican vote last time because of this issue, because she dissembled... So she’s on full notice about this,” Hawley said Tuesday.

Former Kansas Gov. John Carlin, a Democrat who was archivist from 1995 to 2005 after an appointment from President Bill Clinton, said 99% of the time politics doesn’t enter into the job.

He said the only “awkward” situation he encountered in the role came during the 2000 presidential campaign when the National Archives went ahead with the scheduled release that fall of audio tapes from the Nixon White House, which included audio of former President George H.W. Bush, the father of Republican nominee George W. Bush.

“I said if I kicked it off, nobody will know what was actually on them and then the Gore campaign can make a mountain out of a molehill,” Carlin said, recounting conversations he had at the time.

Archivists want to work with people across the political spectrum, he said.

“I can guarantee you that if you’re the archivist, you want to work with and coordinate and communicate in terms of getting budget support and communicating with members of Congress, you can’t be partisan,” Carlin said. “You’ve got to be excited about anybody.”