On Thursday, Donald Trump took the extraordinary step of firing the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, despite her impressive record and years of bipartisan support. House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries released a scathing statement, calling the developments “a disgrace” and an “unprecedented assault.”
Pressed for some kind of explanation, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt accused Hayden of, among other things, “putting inappropriate books in the library for children.” That didn’t make any sense: While Leavitt made it sound as if the Library of Congress were similar to a local lending library, The Washington Post noted, “Children cannot check out books at the Library of Congress. Individuals must be 16 or older to register for a reader card to do research at the Library of Congress, and those 16 and 17 years old need a parent’s permission.”
But as the dust settled on the president’s unjust move and congressional Democrats took steps to change the way positions like the librarian of Congress are hired and fired, The Associated Press reported on Trump firing another official under dubious circumstances.
The Trump administration has fired the nation’s top copyright official, Shira Perlmutter, days after abruptly terminating the head of the Library of Congress, which oversees the U.S. Copyright Office. The office said in a statement Sunday that Perlmutter received an email from the White House a day earlier with the notification that ‘your position as the Register of Copyrights and Director at the U.S. Copyright Office is terminated effective immediately.’
The White House hasn’t yet tried to justify the move, though it’s worth noting that Perlmutter, who worked for the legislative branch, was hired for the position nearly five years ago by Hayden, the librarian of Congress whom the president fired a day earlier.
Time will tell whether anyone in the West Wing tries to come up with a defense for this, but in the meantime, Rep. Joe Morelle, the ranking member on the House Administration Committee, noted in a written statement, “Register Perlmutter is a patriot, and her tenure has propelled the Copyright Office into the 21st century by comprehensively modernizing its operations and setting global standards on the intersection of AI and intellectual property.”
But that’s not all the New York Democrat said. “Donald Trump’s termination of Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, is a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis. It is surely no coincidence he acted less than a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk’s efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models,” Morelle added. It seems like a highly relevant detail. A Politico report noted, “Perlmutter and her office issued a lengthy report about artificial intelligence that included some questions and concerns about the usage of copyrighted materials by AI technology, an industry which Musk is heavily involved in.” Not quite 24 hours later, Trump fired Perlmutter, seemingly without cause. I don’t imagine we’ve heard the last of this one.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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