Kavanaugh’s White House role: ‘Everything’
Senators argue over how much everything they need
WASHINGTON – For three eventful years of George W. Bush’s presidency – involving wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Hurricane Katrina, battles over abortion and immigration, and two Supreme Court vacancies – Brett Kavanaugh held one of the most important jobs in the White House.
As the Senate considers Kavanaugh’s qualifications for the Supreme Court, his work as staff secretary – described by others who have held the job as the president’s inbox and outbox – remains a black hole.
Republicans are releasing hundreds of thousands of pages from Kavanaugh’s years as a federal appeals court judge, associate White House counsel and aide to independent counsel Ken Starr. A treasure trove of documents that could reach 3 million pages from 2003-06 is being withheld. Republicans say they’re irrelevant; Democrats say they’re irreplaceable.
While the partisan battle continues to unfold, one thing is clear: Former White House staff secretaries don’t think they were mere traffic cops outside the Oval Office.
“It makes me laugh that they are talking about this job as just a paper-pusher,” says Lisa Brown, President Barack Obama’s first staff secretary. “There’s some truth on both sides of this, but it belies the critical importance of the role to say that the staff secretary documents should be off-limits.”
Kavanaugh himself told the Senate Judiciary Committee in 2004 that his job was to “give recommendations and advice” while ultimately carrying out directions from superiors. In a speech nine years later, he said his White House experience “helped make me a better student of the administrative process, a better interpreter of statutes.”
James Cicconi, President George H.W. Bush’s first staff secretary, says the Senate doesn’t need to see every speech, schedule and congressional resolution that crossed Kavanaugh’s desk to judge whether he’s fit for the high court. That would be a “fishing expedition.”
“Literally everything the president sees goes through the staff secretary’s office,” Cicconi says. “The essence of it is to be an honest broker. You’re the president’s protector in many ways against bad information or incomplete information.”
At the root of the document dispute is the sheer volume of information – several million pages, according to the National Archives and Records Administration. A thorough examination would extend well past the election in November, risking Republicans’ Senate majority and Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
Some Democrats and their allies suggested that a compromise could call for releasing anything Kavanaugh wrote, rather than the mundane documents and emails that passed through his hands, BlackBerry, cellphone and computer.
“There’s plenty of times when the way in which you, as the staff secretary, see an issue or perceive an issue is going to matter,” says Todd Stern, who served three years as staff secretary to President Bill Clinton. “I don’t think this is a close call.”
By the time Kavanaugh inherited the position from Harriet Miers, whose own Supreme Court nomination in 2005 was withdrawn amid bipartisan opposition, it had become an all-consuming job. Kavanaugh recalled starting his day with a “fire drill” at 6:15 a.m. and checking out after 9:30 p.m.
Those three years were chock-full of controversial issues. Bush signed abortion restrictions, sought a same-sex marriage ban, expanded Medicare, opposed euthanasia and stem cell research, and failed to partially privatize Social Security or create a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.
Throughout those years, the administration defended its “enhanced interrogation” of detainees in the war against terrorism. Kavanaugh denied any involvement in the debate over torture during his confirmation hearings for the appeals court. Hurricane Katrina struck in August 2005. A week later, Chief Justice William Rehnquist died.
“I sat on my couch at home, just thinking about the enormity of all of that,” he said in 2013.
Kavanaugh told the White House Transition Project in 2008 that his job was to be Bush’s honest broker – a description shared by other staff secretaries. “It was important that I maintain strict neutrality and impartiality in that role so that the president and his policy staff would have confidence that their concern would be presented to the president fairly,” he said.
Staff secretaries do not need a law degree, but most of them have been lawyers. “The job is one about judgment and temperament, more than anything else,” says Raj De, who succeeded Brown as Obama’s staff secretary. “Virtually every staff secretary has been a lawyer, and I think that is because the job draws on some of the same skill sets that lawyers have to bring to bear every day.”