Judge halts sale of National Archives building in Seattle

SEATTLE (AP) - A federal judge has granted a preliminary injunction to stop the sale of the National Archives building in Seattle.

More than two dozen Native American and Alaska Native tribes and cultural groups from the Northwest, along with the states of Washington and Oregon, sued the federal government to stop the sale and the relocation of millions of invaluable historical records to California and Missouri.

The Seattle Times reported that U.S. District Court Judge John Coughenour asked Brian C. Kipnis, an assistant U.S. attorney in Seattle, if anybody on the five-person Public Buildings Reform Board was from the Pacific Northwest.

That’s the little-known entity which recommended the closure and sale of the building in Seattle. The board was created in 2016 to find what it deems to be excess federal property.

Kipnis said he didn’t know.

The proposed sale was among the decisions taken in the final months of the administration of then-President Donald Trump.

The judge said on Feb. 12 that the federal government could have avoided a “public relations disaster” if it had “displayed some sensitivity” to how the closure affected the Northwest.

Washington state Attorney General Bob Ferguson’s office, along with 29 tribes and various groups, filed a lawsuit Jan. 4 seeking to declare the sale illegal. But that lawsuit could take a while to wind its way through the courts, prompting the request for the preliminary injunction, which the judge granted

The Central Council of the Tlingit & Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska is among the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, as is the Tanana Chiefs Conference from Interior Alaska.

The archives contains irreplaceable documents dating to the 1840s and is used for research of tribal history to Japanese internment during World War II and fur seal hunts on remote Alaska islands.

Having declared the 10-acre site in as surplus, the federal government plans to move archival records from Seattle to facilities in Kansas City, Missouri, and Riverside, California.

The move would box up the histories of 272 federally recognized tribes in Washington, Alaska, Oregon and Idaho, as well as all federal records generated in the Pacific Northwest, including military, land, court, tax and census documents.