Brett Kavanaugh's Confirmation Hearing

[fraurosena]

Sen. Leahy is getting pissed.

 

[fraurosena]

Here's the story behind Leahy's questioning, in his own words.

Comment Of Senator Leahy On His Questioning Of Judge Kavanaugh On Hacked Democratic Files

Quote

Between 2001 and 2003, two Republican staffers on the Senate Judiciary Committee regularly hacked into the private computer files of six Democratic senators, including me.  They stole 4,670 files, and they used them to assist in getting President Bush’s most controversial judicial nominees confirmed.  This became public in late 2003 when The Wall Street Journal happened to print some of the stolen materials. 

The ringleader behind this massive theft was a Republican Senate staffer named Manny Miranda.  The scandal amounted to a digital Watergate — a theft not unlike Russia’s hacking of the DNC. 

During all of this, Judge Kavanaugh worked in the White House Counsel’s Office on judicial nominations.  He worked hand-in-hand with Miranda to advance these same controversial nominees.  Not surprisingly, Judge Kavanaugh was asked extensively about his knowledge of the theft during both his 2004 and 2006 hearings.  And I mean extensively: 111 questions from six senators, both Republicans and Democrats. 

He testified under oath — and he testified repeatedly — that he never received any stolen materials, and that he knew nothing about it until it was public.  He testified that if he had suspected anything “untoward” he would have reported it.  At the time, we left it there.  We didn’t have evidence to suggest otherwise.

Today, with the limited amount of Judge Kavanaugh’s White House record that has been provided to the Judiciary Committee, for the first time we have been able to learn some information about his knowledge of this theft. 

Here is a description of the three emails that have been made public.  There are many more that have been hidden from public scrutiny under a faulty claim of committee confidentiality.  I suspect there are even more that were never released to the committee at all, based on the partisan and woefully incomplete document production.

Miranda email exposing what I was going to ask a controversial nominee at her coming confirmation hearing.

On July 19, 2002, Mr. Miranda sent Judge Kavanaugh and another Bush official an email asking why the “Leahy people” were looking into financial ties between two special interest groups and Priscilla Owen, a particularly controversial nominee to the Fifth Circuit.  Judge Kavanaugh was the point person in the White House for the Owen nomination.  Then, two days before her hearing, Miranda shared that the Democrats were “passing around” a related 60 Minutes story.  He also said, “Intel suggests that Leahy will focus on all things money.” 

This “intel” was stolen.  In fact, it appears to have originated with a memo I received from my staff the night before Miranda sent it to Judge Kavanaugh.

 Miranda email disclosing private draft letter of mine before any mention of it was public.

In January 2003, Mr. Miranda forwarded to Judge Kavanaugh a private letter from me and other Judiciary Democrats to then-Majority Leader Tom Daschle.  This letter was a draft, and obviously so.  Someone eventually leaked its existence to Fox News.  This was a private letter, and at the time I was shocked to learn its existence had been leaked.  But here’s the thing:  Judge Kavanaugh had the full text of my letter in his inbox before any reference to the letters existence was leaked to the press. 

This letter was big news in the judicial nominations world at the time.  And Judge Kavanaugh was a main player in that world.  He would have known that he received this letter before it was in the press.

Miranda wanted to meet privately, off-site, with Judge Kavanaugh and another Bush official to hand-deliver documents related to Senators Feinstein and Biden.

Judge Kavanaugh said at the time he couldn’t make it, but wanted to discuss it later.

Only part of this chain has been made public.  Additional emails raise further suspicion.

Judge Kavanaugh disclosed in his testimony today that he may have met privately with Miranda on other occasions.

There are numerous other committee confidential emails that shed light on Judge Kavanaugh’s relationship with Miranda.  They need to be made public now, before it’s too late.  They raise serious questions about Judge Kavanaugh’s claim that he never suspected he benefited from this massive hacking of Democratic files.  And they also raise questions about his truthfulness under oath in response to the 111 questions he received on this topic the last time he was before the Judiciary Committee. 

Senator Grassley has assured me he will release these documents for my questions tomorrow.

We'll have to wait until tomorrow to see if Grassley will be true to his word.

[GreyhoundFan]

58 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

We'll have to wait until tomorrow to see if Grassley will be true to his word.

I'll spare you the wait: he won't be.

[fraurosena]

18 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

I'll spare you the wait: he won't be.

The question is, will Leahy then release the documents he has to the public? And if he does, how will the Repugs try to wriggle their way out of that scandal, as it will be irrefutably proven that Kavanaugh lied under oath. Somehow I don't think "lalalala" will work... 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

"5 takeaways from day two of the Brett Kavanaugh hearings"

Spoiler

The hearings for President Trump's Supreme Court nominee are partisan, dramatic and so fitting for this political moment. A lot is on the line for both sides. Republicans want to put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court before the November midterm elections. Democrats don't want the court to cement its 5-4 conservative majority, especially when this Supreme Court could play a big role in the Russian election interference investigation.

Here are five takeaways from day two of several days of hearings:

1. Trump is making Kavanaugh's life significantly harder.

Kavanaugh was already coming into this hearing with a difficult task: convince Congress that he isn't a lackey Supreme Court pick for a president who has repeatedly flouted the rule of law.

The day before the hearings began, Trump gave Kavanaugh's critics fresh ammunition. The president tweeted that the Justice Department shouldn't have prosecuted Republican members of Congress so close to the midterm elections.

Kavanaugh set out right away to buffer himself by asserting he believes a good judge is independent of political pressure: "No president is above the law," he said repeatedly. But when Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) read those tweets out loud and tried to pin Kavanaugh on how he felt about this, Kavanaugh ducked, saying he shouldn't comment on current events less people think judges are "politicians in robes."

Actually, Kavanaugh declined to talk about pretty much any of Trump's legal controversies.

Other senators brought up the fact Kavanaugh was picked by a president who, just week ago, was accused by his personal lawyer of committing a crime. "It is unprecedented for a Supreme Court nominee to be named by a president who is an unindicted co-conspirator [in a crime]," said Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.). He asked Kavanaugh if he would recuse himself from cases involving Trump's criminal liability. Kavanaugh said he wouldn't make a decision on that now because it's an ongoing case.

"I'm going to take that as a no," Blumenthal said.

2. Kavanaugh backed away from his written views that a president shouldn't face criminal investigation.

Kavanaugh is a conservative judge — some scholars have argued he is one of the most conservative federal judges. But his writings that have most alarmed Democrats and some Republicans came in a 2009 Minnesota Law Review article, in which he argued that criminal investigations and lawsuits against the president are “time-consuming and distracting” and ultimately don’t serve the public good.

Coming from a lawyer who was a key player investigating Bill Clinton, the about-face was perplexing. And it's a concerning position to some senators who know this Supreme Court could decide whether Trump has to sit down with special counsel Robert S. Mueller III for an interview.

On Wednesday, Kavanaugh backed away from that expansive view of executive power by arguing he was just spitballing about how to protect a president from unnecessary and distracting lawsuits. His writings that investigations are a distraction were just ideas, he said, not his actual constitutional philosophy. He had just come from the Bush White House, where he watched a president wage war while trying to protect America from future 9/11-style terrorist attacks.

"After September 11, I thought very deeply about the presidency, and I thought very deeply about the independent counsel experience, and I thought about how those things interacted,” he said. “So I proposed some ideas for Congress to consider. They were not my constitutional views."

That wasn't enough to assuage concerns by Kavanaugh's Democratic critics. "I do think there is good reason for members of this committee to be concerned about a whole range of things you've said or written about whether or not a president can be held accountable," Sen. Christopher Coons (D-Del.) said after 30 minutes of questioning Kavanaugh on this.

But it seemed enough for Republicans. Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), a frequent Trump critic, said: "I'm headed toward voting for you because I don't believe any of those things are true."

3. On every other hot-button issue, Kavanaugh adopted the say-nothing style that Justice Gorsuch perfected.

In his confirmation hearing last year, Justice Neil M. Gorsuch wouldn't even share his opinion on the Second Amendment.

Kavanaugh took much the same approach. He wouldn't say whether a sitting president could be subpoenaed (something that Mueller threatened to do to Trump and a matter that could end up at the Supreme Court). He would only give his opinion on court cases that had been decided decades ago. He said that the 1970s case legalizing abortion, Roe v. Wade, is “settled law" but left himself wiggle room to uphold increasingly restrictive abortion laws in the states. And maybe even to rule against legalized abortion. Here's one telling exchange:

Blumenthal: "Can you commit sitting here today that you would never overturn Roe v. Wade?"

Kavanaugh deferred: "Each of eight justices on the Supreme Court now declined to answer that question."

4. Kavanaugh's background in politics is both a help and a hindrance.

Kavanaugh is a clear, direct speaker who can tailor his words to whether he's talking to a critic or a supporter. He would mention he grew up in the Washington, D.C., area in the '70s and '80s — then known as "the murder capital of the world" — before explaining why he ruled assault weapons are constitutional.

He also demonstrated he is fully aware of the political pressure cooker his confirmation hearing is taking place in.

"I want to reassure everyone that I base my decisions on the law, but I do so on the awareness of the facts and awareness of the real-world consequences,” he said when asked what he's say to to the father of a Parkland, Fla., shooting victim in the audience. “And I have not lived in a bubble."

But Kavanaugh's political background comes from being a top aide and lawyer in the George W. Bush White House. And that means he's been asked to answer for some of that White House's most controversial decisions — torture, detention, the Iraq War, Bush staffers who resigned over hacking of Senate Democrats' emails.

Kavanaugh says he didn't have any knowing involvement in the email scandal. And he says he did not help set up or give legal advice for the Bush-era enhanced interrogation techniques that Congress later banned, a point of contention for Democrats who think he did play a role.

We may never fully know the extent of Kavanaugh's advisory role during the post-9/11 era, given that Republicans haven't requested records from his time as Bush's staff secretary, a gatekeeper position that allowed him to determine which proposals made their way to the president.

5. This hearing is a manifestation of the Trump era.

The Kavanaugh hearings are a perfect manifestation of the hyperpartisan era we're in right now. Democrats tried to stop the hearing before it got started, arguing it was “tainted.” Republicans accused Democrats of contempt of court and protesters of “mob rule.” An unusually high number of protesters — 70 or so arrested on the first day — led Capitol Police to briefly stop admitting the public into these hearings, a rare thing to do.

Much of this drama can be traced directly back to who's in the White House. Democrats have accused Republicans and Trump of “hiding” Kavanaugh's past to get a friendly face for Trump on the Supreme Court. Some Republicans argued that democracy is broken because Democrats want to reflexively oppose Trump. “What is wrong with our country?” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) at one point Wednesday.

Kavanaugh’s nomination will probably scrape by on a purely party-line vote, both in committee and possibly the full Senate, bearing out that this hearing is everything that has come to define politics in the Trump era.

 

[Howl]

I've been seeing a lot on twitter about Kavanaugh's finances, specifically large debts that somehow managed to disappear in the last year or so. 

[AuntK]

I have a really bad feeling about him! I think he is lying out his ass and the Repugs are hiding some very ugly info about him! He might be the most corrupt candidate ever!

[fraurosena]

Kamala Harris:

 

[Cartmann99]

Day 3 livestream link for later today:

https://youtu.be/4vGW0oEiLpg

Archives from earlier in the week:

Day 1: https://youtu.be/ryVVTFzaADM

 

Day 2: https://youtu.be/x9fHsoqAkLU

 

[fraurosena]

Could there be documents? Tapes? Witnesses? 

 

[fraurosena]

Let's hope someone asks these questions.

 

[fraurosena]

Things are getting off to a good start today.

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[fraurosena]

@AmazonGrace, did this happen at the hearing?

 

[fraurosena]

Here they are:

Leaked Kavanaugh Documents From Time at White House Discuss Abortion, Affirmative Action

Quote

As a White House lawyer in the Bush administration, Judge Brett Kavanaugh challenged the accuracy of deeming the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision to be “settled law of the land,” according to a secret email obtained by The New York Times.

The email, written in March 2003, is one of thousands of documents that a lawyer for President George W. Bush turned over to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Supreme Court nominee but deemed “committee confidential,” meaning it could not be made public or discussed by Democrats in questioning him in hearings this week. It was among several an unknown person provided to The New York Times late Wednesday.

Judge Kavanaugh was considering a draft opinion piece that supporters of one of Mr. Bush’s conservative appeals court nominees hoped they could persuade anti-abortion women to submit under their names. It stated that “it is widely accepted by legal scholars across the board that Roe v. Wade and its progeny are the settled law of the land.”

Judge Kavanaugh proposed deleting that line, writing: “I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level since Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so.”

[Read the email.- linked in the article]

He was presumably referring to then-Justices William Rehnquist and Antonin Scalia, along with Justice Clarence Thomas, conservatives who had dissented in a 1992 case that reaffirmed Roe, Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The court now has four conservative justices who may be willing to overturn Roe — Justices Thomas and John C. Roberts Jr., Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch — and if he is confirmed, Judge Kavanaugh could provide the decisive fifth vote.

Still, his email stops short of saying whether he personally believed that the abortion rights precedent should be considered a settled legal issue.

Democrats have complained about relying on Mr. Bush’s lawyer rather than the National Archives to decide what to provide to the Senate, as one part of a larger fight over how many documents from Judge Kavanaugh’s years in the Bush administration the Senate and public should be able to vet before his confirmation vote.

A White House spokesman, Raj Shah, had no immediate comment on the disclosure of the secret files. But late on Wednesday, in the context of the some of the documents, he condemned the disclosure of “committee confidential” documents as a violation of Senate rules.

Other documents provided to The Times included a document showing that in September 2001, after the terrorist attacks, Judge Kavanaugh engaged with a Justice Department lawyer about questions of warrantless surveillance at the time that lawyer wrote a memo an inspector general report later portrayed as the precursor to the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program.

On Wednesday, Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, seemed to allude to the existence of such an email, grilling Judge Kavanaugh about whether his testimony at his May 2006 appeals court hearing that he had not seen or heard anything about the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program before its existence leaked the previous December was accurate.

[Read the email.- linked in the article]

In another document, Judge Kavanaugh expressed a critical view about some Department of Transportation affirmative action regulations, writing:

“The fundamental problem in this case is that these DOT regulations use a lot of legalisms and disguises to mask what is a naked racial set-aside,” he wrote, adding that he thought the court’s four conservative justices at the time would probably “realize as much in short order and rule accordingly.”

[Read the email.]

Still another includes language about Native Hawaiians that could prove problematic not only to Hawaii’s two Democratic senators but to Senator Lisa Murkowski, Republican of Alaska, a key swing vote who guards the interests of Native Alaskans. In the email, Mr. Kavanaugh questions Native Hawaiians as a protected group like Indian tribes. He wrote that prepared testimony “needs to make clear that any program targeting Native Hawaiians as a group is subject to strict scrutiny and of questionable validity under the Constitution.”

Another document shed further light on the extent to which Judge Kavanaugh was viewed inside the Bush administration as playing a significant role in trying to get a disputed appeals court nominee, Charles W. Pickering Sr., confirmed.

During his own appeals court nomination, Judge Kavanaugh had distanced himself from that nomination, omitting it from a list of the major ones he worked on and telling senators that it was not one of those he “primarily” handled, and in August Democrats — based on documents they were allowed to make public — had accused him of having been misleading, while hinting that more details were in the still-confidential documents.

Judge Pickering, who retired in 2004, later told National Review that another White House lawyer, Noel Francisco, the current solicitor general, was his liaison and that he did not recall interacting with Judge Kavanaugh or knowing his name at the time.

But one of the newly obtained documents shows that when another White House lawyer, Brad Berenson, was invited to a meeting in March 2002 with two top Republican senators, he referred to both Judge Kavanaugh and Mr. Francisco as two colleagues who were “much more involved” in that nomination.

“I could probably make it, but Brett and Noel have been much more involved in the Pickering fight, which is what I assume this is about,” Mr. Berenson wrote.

[Read the email.- linked in the article]

In another email, analyzing a complex May 2003 ruling by a panel of three district court judges about a campaign-finance disclosure law, Judge Kavanaugh appeared to exhibit hostility to a rule that corporate and union funds could not be used to pay for issue ads that attacked or supported a specific candidate for federal office; instead funding for such ads would have to come from separate funds and disclosed to the Federal Election Commission.

Noting that rule was arguably more expansive than another part of the regulations the panel had struck down, Judge Kavanaugh wrote that the decision by two of the judges to uphold that rule was “both strange and dangerous.” Fortunately, he added, the Supreme Court was likely to take a fresh look at the issue and would “not care” what the lower-court judges thought.

[Read the email.- linked in the article]

And in yet another, he offered advice for an appeals court nominee who was scheduled to meet with two Democratic senators:

“She should not talk about her views on specific policy or legal issues,” he wrote. “She should say that she has a commitment to follow Supreme Court precedent, that she understands and appreciates the role of a circuit judge, that she will adhere to statutory text, that she has no ideological agenda.”

[Read the email.- linked in the article]

If I have interpreted this correctly, I have to say that this is a brilliant strategic move by the Democrats. Oh, it's wonderful that they've made these documents public, but that's not why it's brilliant. What they have done by making them public, and constantly pointing out again and again that they were willing to suffer the consequences of that act, is to force the Senate to pick up that issue, and do something about it.  I would even go so far as to say Booker was actually goading the Repugs into action.

The Senate will have convene today about this apparent violation of the rules, which has the effect of cutting the whole nomination hearings short, as every senator will have to be present for the closed door session wherein the conduct of Cory Booker and other Democratic senators will have to be discussed. 

Brilliant. Simply brilliant.

 

[fraurosena]

Here you can see what I mean about goading them to take action:

 

[fraurosena]

Can I please vomit? Because I really need to after seeing that sychophantic ass-licking that Graham just did....

[fraurosena]

So he lied under oath... and still the Repugs will confirm him.

(thread)

 

[Audrey2]

4 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

So he lied under oath... and still the Repugs will confirm him.

(thread)

 

Morally, as a whole, the Republicans are an abyss. They truly have no bottom. They're morally bankrupt. (There are a few Republicans with standards, but not many.)

[fraurosena]

6 minutes ago, Audrey2 said:

(There are a few Republicans with standards, but not many.)

Those few are willing to look the other way, hold their noses, do as they're told and vote for Kavanaugh. 

In my view they're just as morally bankrupt and those standards are meaningless.

[AmazonGrace]

 

[AmazonGrace]

 

[fraurosena]

Holy shit, you guys!

You all need to read this thread. Jennifer Cohn explains that Russia has probably hacked Kavanaugh's (and other GOP) emails from that era.