Dems search for Kavanaugh dirt
Find offer to aid terror deliberations
WASHINGTON — Democratic lawmakers’ paper chase for documents on President Trump’s Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh produced a nugget of information they are likely to seize upon — but not likely enough to block him.
Kavanaugh, as a Bush administration associate White House counsel, sent an email offering to join deliberations about the post-Sept. 11 treatment of terror detainees — an issue Democrats have already flagged as a confirmation flashpoint.
“I am happy to help out with this on the attorneyclient issue, but you should obviously handle tribunals,” Kavanaugh replied to thenassociate White House counsel Bradford Berenson. Berenson had asked Kavanaugh to help prepare then-Attorney General John Ashcroft to testify before Congress about detainees’ treatment, including “military tribunals, monitoring of atty/client conversations, racial profiling, etc.”
Earlier this week, Sen. Dick Durbin said he believes Kavanaugh lied during his 2006 confirmation hearings for his post on a federal appellate court when he said he “was not involved and am not involved in questions regarding the rules regarding detention of combatants.”
The email is among the more than 5,700 pages of documents released to the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday and among more than 100,000 more pages of documents the National Archives is releasing on a rolling basis. It is unclear from the released documents whether or how Kavanaugh was involved in Ashcroft’s preparation, but Ashcroft went on to defend the monitoring of terror suspects’ privileged conversations.
Democrats have ratcheted up efforts to obtain Kavanaugh documents, including filing a Freedom of Information Act request this week, an unusual move.
The Senate’s top Democrats yesterday accused Republicans of stalling by adding “layer after layer of unprecedented secrecy,” and allowing William Burck, a lawyer and former Kavanaugh White House deputy, to handle the document release process.
“Not only is a massively conflicted Republican lawyer, who previously worked for Judge Kavanaugh, cherry-picking what documents the Senate Judiciary Committee can see, he is now telling the Committee what the rest of the Senate and the American public can see — and Republicans are playing along,” Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) said.
But Democrats’ efforts are unlikely to be fruitful, absent a new revelation on Kavanaugh’s view on the only issue that could flip at least one Republican: abortion.
Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins said she wouldn’t support a candidate who expresses hostility to the court’s precedent in Roe v. Wade — something Kavanaugh is smart enough not to do before he’s confirmed. Collins has also supported nearly every one of Trump’s judicial nominees, including Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, meaning Democrats’ Hail Mary on Kavanaugh will likely fall short.