Last April, I blogged the flap over the Bush administration's attempt to replace the Archivist of the United States, something that looks suspiciously like an attempt to have a hand-picked successor on hand next January, which when the GHW Bush administration papers become potentially open to public viewing. The Washington Post has an article on the issue, which includes a thumbnail of the proposed new Archivist's confirmation hearings. It has to be said that he doesn't sound so bad…although why the Bush people wanted to push out the incumbent early remains very mysterious.
Recent Bluessky Posts- Re-posting this here for good measure: bsky.app/profile/mfro... March 20, 2026 Michael Froomkin
- Looks like we've found some immigration fraud. March 20, 2026 Michael Froomkin
- I propose the creation of a law journal reserved for articles written at least substantially by GenAI ("The Stochastic Law Journal"?). Query1: Have human or AI editors doing article selection and/or editing? Query2: When eds find hallucinations/other errors should they fix or just identify them? March 20, 2026 Michael Froomkin
- All other things equal (yes, they're not), you would expect more populous states to have more cases. Is there a map that normalizes for population? (Or for that matter that goes by country, since Miami/Tallahassee is a long way in germ miles.) March 20, 2026 Michael Froomkin
- Jotwell Contracts: Martha Ertman, Racial Harms, Contracts, & Reparations, JOTWELL (March 20, 2026) (reviewing Dorothy Brown, Getting to Reparations: How Building a Different America Requires a Reckoning with Our Past (2026)), contracts.jotwell.com/racial-harms.... March 20, 2026 Jotwell
If you don’t think the fix is in, I have a small, but valuable bridge in Brooklyn to sell you
there’s also something about the 9// papers (the unclassifed ones) becoming available – or not – during the new term of the new archivist. I posted about it here.
John Dean has pointed out that documents from the Bush 41 administation are due for release and Bush 41 has issued an executive order that allows a variety of people to restrict release of documents from prior adminstrations. The executive order conflicts with the statute authorizing document release after twelve years. I’m not sure who has standing to force release of docments, but it seems the Archivist may be the primary positions with the authority to release documents and challenge the executive order.
Congress may be able to challenge restriction of documents, but it the challenge to Bush 41’s executive order may need to be generated by a Republican controlled committee. A Bush Archivist might be far less likely to challenge the executive order that allows not only Bush 41, but members of his administration and Bush family members to object to document release.