Republicans roll out reams of Kavanaugh docs
Senate Republicans released a bundle of White House documents on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh yesterday, just weeks before the start of his confirmation hearings, in an effort to push back against Democrats’ claims that the GOP is rushing his approval process without proper vetting.
Just days after Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) announced that Kavanaugh’s nearly weeklong confirmation hearing would begin Sept. 4, the committee released roughly 103,000 pages of documents yesterday, adding to a growing cache that includes everything from White House memos about his views on presidential indictments to mundane emails of news clips and lunch plans.
Leading up to yesterday’s release, Senate Democrats had enlisted in a public campaign to cast their Republican counterparts as obstructionists who were hiding Kavanaugh’s records by rushing the confirmation process before the National Archives could fully produce all the documents relevant to his White House tenure. The National Archives said it would not be able to vet and release all relevant documents in its possession before October.
Saturday, committee Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California tweeted that only a fraction of Kavanaugh’s documents had been released, a stark contrast to President Barack Obama’s Supreme Court picks whose records were almost fully available weeks before the start of their Senate hearings. “It’s unprecedented to go to these lengths to hide a Supreme Court nominee’s records from the American people,” Feinstein tweeted.
The latest release was by committee Republicans who are working with William Burck, a lawyer and former Kavanaugh White House deputy, to make documents public before the official National Archives release.
Among the revelations from the documents so far is Kavanaugh’s view in 1998 that “an indictment should not be pursued while the president is in office.”
That view was expressed in a memo drafted by Kavanaugh when he was part of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s team investigating then-President Bill Clinton.
The documents also reveal that Kavanaugh expressed a willingness to be part of the Bush White House team that helped prepare then-Attorney General John Ashcroft for his testimony regarding enemy combatants and other detainees in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. Kavanaugh said in a memo that he was willing to advise Ashcroft on the practice of the government having access to attorney-client communications of detainees. Those are likely to be flash points during next month’s hearing.