Memo: Kavanaugh sought Clinton queries

WASHINGTON – Twenty years ago this month, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh urged fellow investigators in the independent counsel’s office to ask President Bill Clinton extremely graphic questions about his affair with Monica Lewinsky.

The point, Kavanaugh said, was to help Congress “decide whether the interests of the presidency would be best served by having a new president.”

While the general nature of Kavanaugh’s memo was previously reported, the National Archives and Records Administration on Monday released the two-pager following a Freedom of Information Act request from the judicial transparency group Fix the Court.

Kavanaugh wanted colleagues preparing to interview Clinton to ask about such details as oral sex in the Oval Office, vaginal stimulation, masturbation and phone sex, all as a way of determining if the president would deny what Lewinsky had told investigators.

“The president has disgraced his office, the legal system, and the American people by having sex with a 22-year-old intern and turning her life into a shambles – callous and disgusting behavior that has somehow gotten lost in the shuffle,” Kavanaugh wrote.

Kavanaugh saw things differently when it came to issuing independent counsel Ken Starr’s final report, urging that it not be so salacious. And more than a decade later, he wrote that presidents should be spared from responding to civil lawsuits or criminal investigations while in office.

“A president who is concerned about an ongoing criminal investigation is almost inevitably going to do a worse job as president,” he wrote in the Minnesota Law Review.