Two men claiming to be Trump appointees were denied entry to the US Copyright Office Monday.
The men arrived at the internal Library of Congress agency with a document claiming to be agency officials as appointed by the White House, reported WIRED. They claimed to be Brian Nieves, a new deputy librarian, and Paul Perkins, a new acting director of the office as well as acting registrar, a source told the publication. “It is unclear whether the men accurately identified themselves,” WIRED noted.
The document the two men referred to also specified that deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, a former defense attorney for Donald Trump, was the acting librarian of Congress.
The men were not allowed in by Capitol Police, a source told the publication, though the law enforcement agency rejected that anyone had been denied entry or escorted out.
Individuals with those names currently work in the federal government. Nieves serves as the deputy chief of staff at the office of the deputy attorney general, while Perkins is an associate deputy attorney general at the Department of Justice, their Linkedin profiles reveal.
The attempted entry came two days after Trump fired Shira Perlmutter, the director of the Copyright Office. Perlmutter had served in the role since October 2020, but her exit came one day after the agency published a 108-page “pre-publication” report questioning the legality of utilizing copyrighted materials to train artificial intelligence.
Copyright lawyers that spoke with WIRED described the report—and its premature release—as outside the norm for the agency. But the report’s determination was highly anticipated, as growth in Silicon Valley currently rests on the rapid advancement of artificial intelligence and its ability to steal information from publishers, news outlets, artists, musicians, and countless other professions.
The nation’s Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden also received the boot earlier last week. She was the first woman and the first Black person to serve in the role. Speaking with reporters Friday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt blamed Hayden’s removal on the librarian’s “pursuit of DEI” and for “putting inappropriate books in the library for children,” claiming that Hayden’s appointment “did not fit the needs of the American people.
Both Hayden and Perlmutter had faced scrutiny by conservatives, including the nonprofit government oversight group American Accountability Foundation that had called for their dismissal.
“The President and his team have done an admirable and long-needed job cleaning out deep state liberals from the federal government. It is time they show Carla Hayden and Shira Perlmutter the door and return an America First agenda to the nation’s intellectual property regulation,” AAF’s president Tom Jones told the Daily Mail last month.
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