The Trump administration ultimately withheld more than 100,000 pages of documents on executive-privilege grounds alone. Kavanaugh’s Bush-era records were reviewed for release by Bill Burck, a Bush attorney and longtime GOP operative. But many of them could be, and Republicans spent last summer ensuring that most of them would remain undisclosed during the run-up to his confirmation. Some of those records couldn’t be released under federal law. By some estimates, Kavanaugh’s paper trail amounted to more than 1 million documents-a far greater mass of records than any previous nominee.
Most of that work took place inside the federal government, which holds all the records from the Starr investigation and the Bush administration.
Circuit Court of Appeals, one of the most influential courts in the nation. Bush’s legal team during the Florida recount battle as a lawyer in the White House counsel’s office who vetted prospective federal judges. Kavanaugh had spent most of his career after law school working to advance conservative interests: as a staff attorney in the independent counsel’s office who investigated Vince Foster’s suicide and co-wrote the Starr Report as a member of George W. Their bet paid off in the form of Neil Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.Īfter Trump nominated Kavanaugh, Republicans built a confirmation process where placing him on the court took priority over scrutinizing his record. The prospect that Hillary Clinton would name Antonin Scalia’s successor helped keep a fractured Republican Party largely united behind Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Anthony Kennedy’s retirement gave the conservative legal movement the opportunity it had sought for more than 40 years: five reliably conservative justices on the Supreme Court, untroubled by swing justices or ideologically transient David Souters. One of the great imbalances in American politics is how much more the right cares about the make-up of the federal judiciary than the left. Then the Times updated the excerpt with additional context: “The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident.” Multiple Democratic candidates responded by calling for the justice’s impeachment. But the Times buried the account within the article and distributed it on social media with a bizarre, off-putting caption. That account, provided by classmate Max Stier, seems to bolster the story told by Debbie Ramirez, who said last year that she experienced similar behavior from Kavanaugh during her time at Yale. It included a previously unreported allegation that Kavanaugh exposed himself during a “drunken dorm party” at Yale and thrust himself at an unnamed woman classmate-which Kavanaugh subsequently denied. The paper published an essay adapted from it in its Sunday Review section. Two of the Times’ reporters, Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, wrote a book on last year’s corrosive confirmation battle.
It’s hard to see how The New York Times could have handled a new allegation against Justice Brett Kavanaugh any worse.
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