Records: White House withholds thousands of pages of documents on Brett Kavanaugh.

WASHINGTON — The Trump White House, citing executive privilege, is withholding from the Senate more than 100,000 pages of records from Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s time as a lawyer in the administration of former President George W. Bush.

The decision, disclosed in a letter that a lawyer for Bush sent Friday to Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, comes just before the start of Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings Tuesday. It drew condemnation from Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., the minority leader.

“We’re witnessing a Friday night document massacre,” Schumer wrote Sunday on Twitter.

“This is just the latest action in a series of actions to obstruct our review of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., added in a tweet.

Democrats and Republicans have been arguing for weeks over access to documents relating to Kavanaugh’s time working for Bush. Democrats say Republicans are blocking access to the documents as part of an effort to ram through the nomination without proper scrutiny.

The bulk of the records being withheld “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,” wrote Bush’s lawyer, William Burck.

They also reflect “advice submitted directly to President Bush,” Burck wrote, as well as communications between White House staff members about their discussions with Bush, and other internal deliberations.

Kavanaugh spent two years, from 2001 to 2003, in the White House Counsel’s Office and later served as staff secretary to the president, a role that required him to vet documents before they reached the president’s desk. None of the staff secretary records have been released, because Grassley did not request them — another point of contention between Republicans and Democrats.

Burck has been heading a team of dozens of lawyers who are reviewing tens of thousands of pages of the Bush White House records, which are held by the National Archives and subject to release under the Presidential Records Act.