Campaign Action
Sen. Patrick Leahy's (D-VT) wants to know from Brett Kavanaugh about his potential perjury before the Senate: "We have discovered evidence that Judge Kavanaugh misled the Senate during his 2004 and 2006 hearings. Truthfulness under oath is not an optional qualification for a Supreme Court nominee."
The evidence of Kavanaugh's perjury, Leahy's questioning of him suggests, is in the documents that Republicans are withholding from the public. Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) followed up on the questioning about this when it was his turn, and zeroed on in those withheld documents. He asked point blank if Kavanaugh was involved in the decision by the Trump administration to use executive authority to withhold key documents. After a number of exchanges in which Kavanaugh hemmed and hawed and refused to weigh in on the irregularity of this document cover up, Durbin asked him again—as he did Tuesday—to request the hearings be postponed until the documents are released. Kavanaugh said, basically that that's not his job. At which point the very cranky Chuck Grassley (R-IA) bailed Kavanaugh out with a lot of bluster.
So Durbin turned again to the time period—his tenure as Bush's staff secretary—all those covered-up documents, questioning Kavanaugh about his involvement in Bush's decision to reserve his right to continue to torture people after Congress told him he couldn't in a bill authored by John McCain outlawing the torture of detainees. Kavanaugh responded he just can't really recall what he might have said or thought about that.
Because, sure, a lawyer doesn't remember what he was thinking when his boss—the president—decided to tell Congress he was going to ignore their law telling him he can't torture people. That's totally plausible. This coming from the guy who explained away his flip-flop on whether or not a president can be indicted (Clinton was totally indictable when Kavanaugh was working with Ken Starr), but 9/11 changed everything, and now he thinks the president should be shielded from any sort of investigation that could interfere with their duties.
Convenient that he landed on this new view of executive immunity just when the president he was working for happened to be committing war crimes and breaking the law.
No wonder Republicans are so intent on a cover-up of this guy's record. No wonder Kavanaugh is a willing participant in hiding his record. Democrats are clearly going to face a total stonewall from Grassley on this public document release. It might be time for them to respond to this unprecedented secrecy and do some leaking of their own, starting with those "Committee Confidential" documents showing Kavanaugh's perjury.