Trump to withhold all of Kavanaugh’s records

President Donald Trump will not release more than 100,000 pages of records from Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s tenure in the George W. Bush White House, claiming they would be covered by executive privilege.

The White House’s decision was disclosed in a letter sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Friday ahead of Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings next week. A Bush representative who has led a team of attorneys reviewing Kavanaugh’s papers confirmed that lawyers have finished going through the records and have turned over about 415,000 pages to the committee, although about 147,000 of those pages are being withheld from public view.

“President Bush directed us to proceed expeditiously and to err as much as appropriate on the side of transparency and disclosure, and we believe we have done so,” attorney Bill Burck, who serves as Bush’s presidential records representative, wrote to the committee.

Burck said in the letter that 101,921 pages are not being given to the committee because the White House believes they are protected by presidential privilege and, after discussions with the Justice Department, “has directed that we not provide these documents for this reason.”

The Presidential Records Act allows both the former administration and the current White House to claim privilege on presidential documents. A White House spokesman, Raj Shah, said Saturday that he will let the letter, first reported by the Associated Press, speak for itself. Trump has not officially invoked executive privilege over the documents.

“Judge Kavanaugh, an associate and senior associate White House counsel, dealt with some of the most sensitive communications of any White House official,” Burck wrote. The major portion of the documents withheld for privilege “reflect deliberations and candid advice concerning the selection and nomination of judicial candidates, the confidentiality of which is critical to any president’s ability to carry out this core constitutional executive function.”

The battle over Kavanaugh’s documents has been a dominant story line in the fight to replace the retired Justice Anthony Kennedy.

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS Claiming executive privilege, the White House has declined to release all the records of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, above, record from when he worked for President George W. Bush.