Senate panel to consider Biden nominee accused of abusive behavior

The Senate Homeland Security Committee on Wednesday is scheduled to consider President Biden’s nominee to serve as the Archivist of the United States, despite a whistleblower complaint made public last week accusing the nominee of abusive behavior.

The nominee, Colleen Shogan, faced a withering round of questions from Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) when she appeared before the panel on Feb. 28 over tweets she made from her personal Twitter account.

Now, Hawley is demanding records from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), where Shogan previously worked, after a whistleblower contacted his office to accuse her of engaging in “a pattern of abusive, retaliatory, and partisan conduct,” according to a letter Hawley sent Tuesday to CRS Director Mary Mazanec.

Hawley wrote that “Dr. Shogan allegedly made unsolicited statements in support of Democratic candidates in the workplace” and that the whistleblower claimed that “Shogan colluded with her colleagues at CRS to undermine the whistleblower’s promotion” and to “demoralize” the employee “in an apparent effort to run her out of CRS.”

He made the request for her records ahead of a vote the Homeland Security Committee plans to take on the nominee Wednesday morning.

The Hill obtained the letter after it was sent to all members of the Homeland Security panel.

Shogan categorically denied the accusations described by Hawley in a letter to the chairman and ranking member of the Homeland Security Committee dated March 10.

The nominee noted she received multiple promotions during her 12-year career at the Library of Congress, earned “outstanding performance ratings and awards” and didn’t face a single reprimand, sanction or warning.

“I never engaged in electioneering in the workplace,” she wrote. “Not once in my entire career with the Library of Congress was I ever accused of electioneering, displaying political favoritism or bias.”

At a hearing last month, the Missouri senator questioned Shogan about tweets she made from her personal account, such as one in January 2021 calling on Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) to “stay in your own lane” in response to his challenge of Joe Biden’s victory in Pennsylvania in the 2020 election.

Shogan also speculated on Twitter in January 2021 that Trump would pardon himself before leaving office and said she hoped that Trump would see his vetoes overridden by Congress before leaving the White House.

Hawley and Shogan clashed at the Homeland Security Committee on Feb. 28, when the nominee repeatedly insisted that her personal Twitter account, which she had locked before testifying, was not political.

“You lied to us under oath,” Hawley fumed after Shogan refused to provide a record of her tweets to the committee. “Now you’re sitting here stonewalling, not answering questions about public posts that you made.”

Hawley now is taking aim at Shogan over her workplace conduct at the Congressional Research Service.

He referred the whistleblower’s allegations about the nominee to Homeland Security Committee Chairman Gary Peters (D-Mich.) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), the committee’s ranking member, last week.

Aides to Peters, Paul and Hawley met with Shogan on Monday afternoon to discuss the allegations, according to a source familiar with the meeting.

Peters urged senators to confirm Shogan in a press release dated Feb. 28 in which he highlighted the support of several nonpartisan groups for the nominee.

The American Historical Association, the American Political Science Association, the Council of State Archivists and the National Trust for Historic Preservation have endorsed her.

Hawley, however, has criticized Shogan for not providing more information about her employment records and her personal tweets. He said in his letter to CRS that she had declined to discuss the whistleblower’s allegations of misconduct in full detail.

“When asked about these allegations, Dr. Shogan indicated that she lacked records requested and directed my office to CRS. Accordingly, I am now reaching out to CRS to request these records,” Hawley wrote in his letter to Mazanec, the research service’s director.

In her letter to the committee, Shogan said she presided over many promotions while at the Congressional Research Service and “each time I denied a promotion, I did so on the basis of an objective, points-based system that required three senior supervisors to concur with the outcome.”

Hawley is also pressing for more detail about the whistleblower’s allegation that Shogan, the author of eight murder mystery novels, promoted one of her books on federal property.

“The whistleblower alleges that Dr. Shogan attempted to organize signing events for her own book on federal property during work hours, for commercial gain, in violation of existing policies,” Hawley wrote.

He noted the event was for a book titled “Stabbing in the Senate,” in which a senator named “Langsford” is murdered.

Sen. James Lankford (R-Okla.) is a current member of the Senate.

Shogan responded to the allegation by explaining that she was invited by the Library of Congress’s then-director of the Center for the Book John Cole to give a lunchtime talk on her first published novel.

“As I understood it, other Library employees had done this, as long as they took annual leave for the duration of the talk,” she wrote in her letter to Peters and Paul.

Shogan said she asked Cole to cancel the event after someone made an anonymous complaint to the Library’s inspector general about an employee engaging in a book talk.

“I never scheduled another public event at the Library of Congress about my subsequent novels, even after leaving Library of Congress employment in 2020. I performed all work on my novels during the evenings and weekends and used a separate computer for my writing,” she told the committee.

Hawley is asking the director of the Congressional Research Service to provide any archived communications related to any actual or proposed event for Shogan’s books, including “Stabbing in the Senate.”

He wants records of grievances filed against Shogan with the Library of Congress or the Congressional Research Service and a record of all communications between the nominee and any union representing Library of Congress employees related to the whistleblower’s application for promotion and accommodations for a disability.

Hawley’s letter on Tuesday follows one he sent to Peters and Paul last week first reporting the whistleblower’s allegations.

“Dr. Shogan allegedly colluded with others in the office to force the whistleblower, a woman with a disability, to take a detail assignment that worsened her mobility and health,” he wrote to the panel’s chairman, flagging allegations that the nominee undermined the whistleblower’s promotion and suppressed reports she authored requested by Congress.

Shogan’s nomination to head the National Archives and Records Administration stalled last year after the Homeland Security Committee deadlocked, 7-7, along party lines when it voted on her nomination.

Democrats now control a one-seat majority on the committee after expanding their majority to 51 seats in the 2022 midterm election.

–Updated at 10:21 a.m.

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