President Trump fired the head of the U.S. Copyright Office, Shira Perlmutter, continuing a purge of suspected "woke" operatives at the Library of Congress.
Perlmutter received an e-mail from the White House explaining that, “your position as the Register of Copyrights and Director at the U.S. Copyright Office is terminated effective immediately.”
Perlmutter was handpicked by Carla Hayden, an Obama appointee who ran the Library of Congress until her sudden firing days ago.
Both women were identified as "deep state liberals" by a conservative activist group, American Accountability Foundation.
"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," Tom Jones the president of the American Accountability Foundation told the Daily Mail.
Trump's wide-ranging purge of "wokeness" from the federal government has included nominally non-partisan institutions, such as the military, that have been recently ideologized by left-wing activists.
Hayden is a regular Democratic donor who criticized efforts to ban LGBT-friendly literature targeting children. Her ten-year term would have ended in 2026.
Perlmutter used to be a policy director at the Patent and Trademark Office and worked on copyright and other areas of intellectual property, the AP reported.
Her firing comes after the Copyright Office released a report on the use of copyrighted materials to train AI models. President Trump is a big supporter of the AI industry, and his close ally, tech billionaire Elon Musk, has called for intellectual property laws to be repealed.
Democrats have suggested Perlmutter was fired because of her report on AI, which was critical of some uses of copyrighted works.
"But making commercial use of vast troves of copyrighted works to produce expressive content that competes with them in existing markets, especially where this is accomplished through illegal access, goes beyond established fair use boundaries,” the report said.
Rep. Joe Morelle of New York, the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee, claimed the timing is "surely no coincidence" without providing anything further to back up the claim.
“Donald Trump’s termination of Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, is a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis,” Morelle fumed.
The Justice Department confirmed Monday that deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, who is also Trump's former defense attorney, has been named acting Librarian of Congress.
Associate Deputy Attorney General Paul Perkins has been named acting register of copyrights, and Blanche's deputy chief of staff Brian Nieves is the deputy librarian of Congress.
