Ranking Member Morelle Releases Committee Report Correcting the Record Following White House Attack on Smithsonian
WASHINGTON – Rep. Joe Morelle (NY-25), the top Democrat on the Committee on House Administration, issued this statement about his new Committee Report written to correct the record after the White House continued its partisan attack on the Smithsonian Institution:
“President Trump is abusing the power of the White House to pressure one of America's most respected cultural institutions into political obedience. The Smithsonian was established as an independent institution precisely so no president could dictate how our nation's story is told. Committee Democrats will continue defending that independence because no president gets to edit the American story.”
Earlier this month, the White House released a report falsely claiming to document “ideological capture” at the National Museum of American History. That report is not a work of scholarship; it is a hyper partisan political document.
The Committee’s report entitled, The White House Campaign to Seize Control of the Smithsonian and Rewrite American History, clearly outlines how:
the Smithsonian answers to its Board of Regents and to Congress, not to the President;
the White House’s so-called report’s central “erasure” claims are contradicted by its own descriptions of the museum;
the context surrounding the quotations from Smithsonian leadership is lacking from the White House’s attack piece;
the Smithsonian’s governing bodies adopted a binding nonpartisanship and content-review policy that the White House ignores entirely; and
the White House’s campaign against NMAH is part of a coordinated, administration-wide effort to control the national historical record.
Ranking Member Morelle will continue to fight against the Trump Administration’s revisionist history campaign as the Committee Republicans shamelessly look forward to assisting during the Committee’s hearing on Wednesday.
Click here to read Ranking Member Morelle’s Committee report.
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