Two men claiming to be newly appointed Trump administration officials tried to enter the US Copyright Office in Washington, DC, on Monday, but left before gaining access to the building, sources tell WIRED. Their appearance comes days after the White House fired the director of the copyright office, Shira Perlmutter, who had held the job since 2020. Perlmutter was removed from her post on Saturday, one day after the agency released a report that raised concerns about the legality in certain cases of using copyrighted materials to train artificial intelligence.
A source familiar with the matter tells WIRED that the two men who tried to enter the Copyright Office showed security at the building a document stating that they had been appointed by the White House to new roles within the office. The source identified the men as Brian Nieves, who claimed he was the new deputy librarian, and Paul Perkins, who said he was the new acting director of the Copyright Office, as well as acting registrar. It is unclear whether the men accurately identified themselves.
There is an official with the name Brian Nieves currently employed as deputy chief of staff at the Office of the Deputy Attorney General, and a Paul Perkins is currently employed as an associate deputy attorney general at the Department of Justice, according to their LinkedIn profiles. The Department of Justice and the White House did not immediately respond to questions from WIRED about whether the two officials had been appointed to work in the Copyright Office.
Sources told WIRED that Capitol Police prevented the men from entering the copyright office, but a spokesperson for the law enforcement agency denied that officers escorted anyone out or denied them entry.
The US Copyright Office is a government agency within the Library of Congress that administers the nation’s copyright laws. It processes applications to copyright creative works and maintains a searchable database of existing registrations. Last week, the Trump administration also fired the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, who was the first woman and the first Black person to hold the position.
The document the two men cited also stated that deputy attorney general Todd Blanche, who previously served as a personal defense lawyer for Trump, was now the acting Librarian of Congress. The Department of Justice announced Monday that Blanche would be replacing Hayden, who had been in the job for nearly a decade. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters that Hayden’s firing stemmed from “quite concerning things she had done at the Library of Congress in pursuit of DEI.”
The Trump Administration has not commented so far on why Perlmutter was fired. Some lawmakers have speculated that her ouster is connected to the report on copyright and AI that her office had released. “Donald Trump’s termination of the Register of Copyrights, Shira Perlmutter, is a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis,” Representative Joe Morelle, the top Democrat on the committee that oversees the Library of Congress, said in a statement on Saturday. “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.”
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