Kavanaugh’s clerks: Diverse, and deployed to vouch for him
Part of the White House public relations campaign to win confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court began only seconds after President Donald Trump nominated him, when Kavanaugh gave a shout-out to his former law clerks and effectively called on them as character witnesses.
“As a judge, I hire four law clerks each year,” Kavanaugh said Monday night in remarks at the White House. “I look for the best. My law clerks come from diverse backgrounds and points of view. I am proud that a majority of my law clerks have been women.”
Of the 48 clerks who worked for Kavanaugh over 12 years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, 25 were women, said Katie Wellington, who worked for him in 2014, when all four clerks were women, including Usha Chilukuri Vance, who now clerks for Chief Justice John Roberts.
The Class of 2014 “was the first year that any judge on the D.C. Circuit had hired four female law clerks,” said Wellington, now an associate at Hogan Lovells in Washington. “It was important to him. His mother was a judge,” she said, adding that 20 of Kavanaugh’s female law clerks have clerked on the Supreme Court.
By 9:07 p.m. Monday, while Trump was still introducing Kavanaugh to the country, a query from CRC landed in reporters’ inboxes: “Would you be interested in speaking with any of the former Judge Kavanaugh clerks? Below are statements for your stories.”
The quotes resembled book jacket blurbs, praising Kavanaugh’s “herculean work ethic,” “deep and nuanced understanding of the law” and “overriding commitment to do justice in every case.” They depicted Kavanaugh as “thinking more rigorously and working more ferociously than any of us,” laboring “on the 100th draft of an opinion (literally) while we both split a Domino’s pizza,” and giving a clerk who gave birth to a son “a copy of ‘Good Night, Gorilla,’ with a thoughtful note.”
Sarah Pitlyk, a former clerk who is now special counsel for the Thomas More Society, a nonprofit law firm that litigates on behalf of anti-abortion groups, said in her statement that Kavanaugh was “an exemplary judge: brilliant, principled and faithful to the text.”
An endorsement letter signed by 34 former clerks — “every single one of Judge Kavanaugh’s clerks not prohibited by their current or pending employment from signing,” according to the letter — was also sent to Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who is the committee’s ranking member.
Brian Fallon, executive director of Demand Justice, a progressive group urging Democrats to vote against any nominee on conservative groups’ list of preferred candidates, said the focus on Kavanaugh’s staff is part of “a purposeful effort to cast himself in a light that is favorable to women because he’s anticipating that his views on abortion and contraception are going to be major issues in his confirmation.” Fallon added that “the whole reason for the Federalist Society shortlist was to ensure that Trump is adhering to their key views, including on abortion.”