May 12 (UPI) -- President Donald Trump has selected three Justice Department lawyers to temporarily fill librarian roles in the Library of Congress.
Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general and President Donald Trump's former personal attorney, on Monday was named acting librarian after Trump on Thursday fired Carla Hayden, who had held the job since 2016. She was the first Black person to serve as the librarian of Congress, which oversees the register of copyrights.
Associate Deputy Attorney General Paul Perkins was named acting copyrights register, replacing Shira Perlmutter, who took over the role in October 2020 when Trump was first president and who was fired over the weekend.
Blanche's deputy chief of staff Brian Nieves was appointed acting deputy librarian of Congress.
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They are all attorneys.
The library holds several million books, films, audio recordings, photographs, manuscripts and other documents. The library also is Congress's primary research arm and the nation's copyright office.
Initially, Robert Newlen, a Library of Congress staffer for more than 40 years, was selected to replace Hayden in an acting capacity.
"You may have read that the White House has appointed a new acting Librarian," Newlen wrote in an email to staff obtained by CBS. "Currently, Congress is engaged with the White House, and we have not yet received direction from Congress about how to move forward. We will share additional information as we receive it."
Hayden described her work to CBS News in 2020
"Personally, being a person of color, it means so much because people who look like me were forbidden by law to learn to read," Hayden said. "That means so much that here is a person of color leading the world's largest library."
The library is an agency of the legislative branch, and Democrats have argued Trump does not have the authority to fire its top official.
Rep. Joe Morelle, the ranking Democrat on the Committee on House Administration, confirmed in a statement that Perlmutter was let go Saturday as the director of the U.S. Copyright Office and Register of Copyrights.
"Donald Trump's termination of Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter is a brazen, unprecedented power grab with no legal basis," Morelle said.
"Register Perlmutter is a patriot, and her tenure has propelled the Copyright Office into the 21st century by comprehensively modernizing its operations and setting global standards on the intersection of AI and intellectual property."
A day before she was let go, Perlmutter's office released a long-awaited report on the use of copyrighted works and artificial intelligence, an industry that Elon Musk, a financial backer of President Donald Trump's and head of the Department of Government Efficiency, is highly involved.
The report raises questions and concerns about the use of copyrighted material and intellectual property to train generative AI systems.
Last month, Jack Dorsey, a co-founder of the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, now X, called for the erasure of all intellectual property law, meaning removing protections such as patents and copyrights, from such works.
"I agree," Musk, who bought Twitter and renamed it X, said in response.
Morelle, in his statement, said it was no coincidence that Perlmutter was fired "less than a day after she refused to rubber-stamp Elon Musk's efforts to mine troves of copyrighted works to train AI models."
Musk owns artificial intelligence company xAI.
The American Federation of Musicians expressed its appreciation to Perlmutter in a statement on Sunday, saying she had "served the American people with unrivaled expertise for decades."
"Her unlawful firing will gravely harm the entire copyright community," the world's largest organization of professional musicians said. "She understood what we all know to be true: human creativity and authorship are the foundation of copyright law -- and for that, it appears, she lost her job."
