Bush pressed for Kavanaugh records
WASHINGTON — Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., is escalating a dispute over Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s records, pressing former President George W. Bush directly to release all the documents from the nominee’s five years in the White House.
In a letter released Friday, Schumer writes to Bush with a “time-sensitive” request: to make public all of Kavanaugh’s paperwork, including from his three years as Bush’s staff secretary, a period when Kavanaugh controlled all the documents that flowed to and from the Oval Office.
Senate Republicans have pushed back against the Democrats’ demand, calling it a delaying tactic and arguing that staff secretary papers would give no insight into how Kavanaugh — President Donald Trump’s pick to replace retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy — would act as a judge. But Schumer is now pushing Bush, arguing that releasing all the nominee’s records is “consistent with your commitment to transparency and is strongly in the public interest.”
“While the country may be divided on whether Judge Kavanaugh should join the Supreme Court, there ought to be no disagreement on whether the process that leads to a confirmation vote should be a fair and impartial one,” Schumer writes to Bush in the two-page letter, obtained by The Washington Post in advance of its release.
In the letter, Schumer also raises concerns about what he deemed an “irregular” approach to dealing with Kavanaugh’s records — which are voluminous and could top 1 million pages, according to estimates from both Democratic and GOP senators.
Schumer says Senate Republicans plan to ask for what Schumer called a “prescreened subset” of Kavanaugh’s White House counsel records that will be vetted by Bush’s legal team, which Schumer argued could potentially exclude the National Archives from the screening process. Republicans dispute that the archives will be excluded.
“I understand that you have a right to review your administration’s documents before they are released, and there is nothing wrong with that,” Schumer wrote to Bush. “My concern is that the Archivist of the United States, who is responsible for guiding the review and release of responsive documents, would be cut out of this new process being contemplated by Senate Republicans.”
The National Archives, in a letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., dated Thursday and also obtained by The Washington Post, confirms that the Archives has already provided copies of some of the Kavanaugh-related records to Bush representatives. The Presidential Records Act allows a former president or his aides special access to the papers, which usually remain private until 12 years after he leaves office.
Bush has asked for access to Kavanaugh’s records in advance of a formal request from the Senate Judiciary Committee so he can get a “jump-start” on going through the nominee’s significant paper trail, according to a person familiar with the review process. Presidents review the paperwork to determine if any should be deemed privileged and should not be released.
The National Archives will have ample input, Republicans say, because any document deemed not a presidential record by Bush’s legal team would be sent back to the Archives to be verified.
“After Sen. Schumer’s bizarre and inaccurate intervention, we can now add fabrication to the fearmongering and deception that Democrat leaders are deploying to smear a well-qualified nominee to the Supreme Court and obstruct the vetting process,” said Taylor Foy, a spokesman for Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. “In the end, none of this changes that fact that Judge Kavanaugh’s significant record on the D.C. Circuit demonstrates his fitness for the high court.”
So far, the archives has not received a direct request from the Senate for Kavanaugh’s documents because Grassley wants Feinstein to sign off on a request that asks for Kavanaugh’s documents from his time in the White House Counsel’s Office — which Republicans agree are fair game — but not his staff secretary records. Democrats say that is insufficient and that all his papers should be released.