Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, released a trove of documents on Thursday from Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s tenure as associate White House counsel to former President George W. Bush.
The document dump, which contained nearly 6,000 pages, came a day after ranking Democrats on the Judiciary Committee filed a series of Freedom of Information Act requests to access records from Kavanaugh’s time in the Bush White House. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has repeatedly accused Republicans of providing insufficient material involving the Supreme Court nominee ahead of his confirmation hearing this fall.
[Related: National Archives releases more than 1,000 pages on Brett Kavanaugh’s work for Kenneth Starr]
According to Grassley’s office, the total number of documents planned for release exceeds 125,000 pages. The Judiciary Committee moved to make the records public after receiving them on a confidential basis from the National Archives and Records Administration last week.
Normally, records from Kavanaugh’s time in the White House would be protected by the Presidential Records Act, which allows former presidents to keep their White House files secret for up to 12 years after leaving office.
But Democrats have repeatedly argued that files from Kavanaugh’s stint as associate White House counsel from 2001 to 2003, and as staff secretary from 2003 to 2006, are relevant to his confirmation process and could provide further insight into his positions on certain issues as well as his broader judicial philosophy.
At least one email contained in the first batch of documents on Thursday could create problems for President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, who testified during his 2006 confirmation hearing for the D.C. Circuit that he did not play a role in shaping the Bush administration’s legal case for enhance interrogation of suspected terrorists.
Kavanaugh was first pressed on the topic by Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin in 2006, who asked about specific legal issues related to the use of torture techniques by U.S. intelligence officials. The now-public email from 2001 shows that Kavanaugh once helped then-Attorney General John Ashcroft prepared for a congressional hearing about Bush administration’s treatment of detainees.
But White House officials said Durbin has since “deliberately” misled his colleagues about the exchange, which did not excluded questions about “legal issues pertaining to the war on terrorism, such as detainees’ legal rights” and focused solely on whether Kavanaugh was involved “in the drafting of specifical legal memoranda which… authorized enhanced interrogation techniques.”
“As several colleagues have stated, and Judge Kavanaugh accurately said in his 2006 testimony, he was not involved in crafting legal policies that formed the rules governing detention of combatants,” White House principal deputy press secretary Raj Shah said in a statement.
“In fact, [Kavanaugh] was not even read into these compartmentalized conversations that pertained to drafting these legal memoranda and rules, and first learned of them from the news media,” Shah added.
Former White House counsel Albert Gonzales, who served alongside Kavanaugh in the West Wing, also said he had no recollection of his former colleague being “involved with the legal issues surrounding the authorization of the use of enhanced interrogation techniques on high value detainees.”
“At the time, a very limited number of personnel in the White House and at the Justice Department were read into that sensitive issue. Brett was not,” Gonzales said, adding that any attempts to misrepresent Kavanaugh’s comments are “wrong and unfair.”
Kavanaugh is expected to appear before the Senate sometime next month for his confirmation hearing, before a final vote takes place in October.
