Supreme Court gets legal complaints over new justice’s testimony
WASHINGTON — Chief Justice John Roberts has received more than a dozen judicial misconduct complaints against newly confirmed Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh in recent weeks but has chosen for the time being not to refer them to a judicial panel for investigation.
A judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit — the court on which Kavanaugh serves — sent a string of complaints to Roberts starting three weeks ago, according to four people familiar with the matter.
That judge, Karen LeCraft Henderson, had dismissed other complaints against Kavanaugh as frivolous, but she concluded that some were substantive enough that they should not be handled by Kavanaugh’s fellow judges in the D.C. Circuit.
In a statement Saturday, Henderson acknowledged the complaints and said they centered on statements Kavanaugh made during his Senate confirmation hearings.
Under the law, “any person may file a misconduct complaint in the circuit in which the federal judge sits,” she said in the statement. “The complaints do not pertain to any conduct in which Judge Kavanaugh engaged as a judge. The complaints seek investigations only of the public statements he has made as a nominee to the Supreme Court of the United States.”
The complaints were handed over as scrutiny of Kavanaugh was intensifying amid allegations that he sexually assaulted a girl while the two were in high school. Kavanaugh has vehemently denied the allegations, as well as two other accusations of improper behaviour.
People familiar with the matter say the allegations made in the complaints — that Kavanaugh was dishonest and lacked judicial temperament in his Senate testimony — had already been discussed in the Senate and in the public realm. Roberts did not see an urgent need for them to be resolved by the judicial branch while he continued to review the incoming complaints, they said.
The situation is highly unusual, legal experts and several people familiar with the matter said. Never before has a Supreme Court nominee been poised to join the court while a fellow judge recommends that a series of misconduct claims against that nominee warrant review.
Roberts’ decision not to immediately refer the cases to another appeals court has caused some concern in the legal community. If Kavanaugh is confirmed, legal experts say, the details of the complaints against him may not become public and instead will be dismissed.
“If Justice Roberts sits on the complaints then they will reside in a kind of purgatory and will never be adjudicated,” said Stephen Gillers, a professor at New York University Law School and an expert on Supreme Court ethics. “This is not how the rules anticipated the process would work.”