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There's clearly a well-justified, albeit nefarious, reason that the White House and Republican leadership plotted weeks ago to keep fellow senators and the American people in the dark about more than 90 percent of Brett Kavanaugh's career in politics. The tiny fraction of records released that have been forced into public discussion (thanks to the rebellion of Democrats on the Judiciary Committee) demonstrates how willing Kavanaugh has been to perjure himself in order to advance his judicial career. The released emails also demonstrate that there is no privacy or national security concern Republicans can fall back on to justify keeping Kavanaugh's record in the dark. They're hiding his record because releasing it would demonstrate how unethical and hyper-partisan the man is.
In previous confirmation hearings in 2004 and 2006, Kavanaugh went to great lengths to separate himself from the tainted George W. Bush administration, which was a challenge since he'd been part of the Bush team since at least the Bush v. Gore litigation which resulted in the installation of Bush into the Oval Office. One of the things Kavanaugh did in the Bush White House was facilitate judicial nominations, and that's what he lied to the Senate about while under oath at least twice. In 2006, during his his D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals confirmation process, Kavanaugh told the committee that "This was not one of the judicial nominees that I was primarily handling," but the emails proved differently.
Charles W. Pickering was one of Bush's most controversial nominees for many reasons, like the time he tried to get the sentence of a man convicted of burning a cross in front of an interracial couple's house reduced. The emails show that "Kavanaugh helped work on a binder of documents about the judge […] to give to Senate staff members; drafted a letter to a senator about him; and handled a draft opinion article supporting his confirmation intended for publication under the name of Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel whose staff called him 'Judge.'"
Kavanaugh also lied to the Senate, while under oath, in 2004 when he said he hadn't had anything to do with the nomination process for the virulently anti-abortion Judge William Pryor, who famously called Roe v. Wade "the worst abomination in the history of constitutional law." Multiple emails showed Kavanaugh working on this nomination, including one in December 2002 in which he wrote "we perhaps should think about recommending Pryor for [the 11th Circuit]." Pryor was nominated for the lifetime appointment in April 2003. Republicans certainly needed to cover that up, just in case a few crucial Republicans decide to act upon principle and vote against Kavanaugh after his racist and anti-abortion views were shoved in their faces.
Then there's "memogate," the 2002 scandal involving a Senate Republican aide named Manuel Miranda who stole Democratic memos from a shared server and gave them to Kavanaugh.
In 2004 and 2006, Kavanaugh told the Senate that he had never received any documents that even "appeared to … have been drafted or prepared by Democratic staff." Democratic Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont had the literal receipts on that one, including eight pages of material stolen from Sen. Leahy by a Democratic "mole" under a subject line that said "spying."
Speaking of spying, there's the two times when Kavanaugh said, under oath, that he first learned about the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance programs with the rest of the nation, when The New York Times exposed them in 2005. But an email from September 17, 2001 shows Kavanaugh participating in the initial discussions about the programs. He wrote to John Yoo, then a Justice Department lawyer, asking about the Fourth Amendment implications of "random/constant surveillance of phone and e-mail conversations of non-citizens who are in the United States when the purpose of the surveillance is to prevent terrorist/criminal violence?" On the same day that Kavanaugh sent his email to Yoo, Yoo sent a memo to the deputy White House counsel evaluating the legality of the hypothetical surveillance programs. In his testimony Wednesday, Kavanaugh insisted that his 2006 testimony that he was ignorant of the program was "100 percent accurate." Amnesia, maybe?
And speaking of illegal Bush administration programs, there's torture. In that same 2006 confirmation hearing, Kavanaugh told Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin that he "was not involved" in legal questions related to the detention of so-called enemy combatants. Durbin, however, has the records showing that there are at least three recorded examples of Kavanaugh participating in discussions of Bush administration detainee policy, including torture. That includes the signing statement Bush attached to the McCain Torture Amendment, reserving the Bush’s right to ignore it. In Thursday's hearing, Kavanaugh stood by his prior answer.
Relatedly, though he didn't lie about this, released emails show that Kavanaugh floated Yoo as an appellate court judge nominee, a suggestion that Bush didn't take. He made that recommendation just days after Yoo circulated his infamous torture memo, in which he wrote that "severe pain and suffering" in "enhanced interrogation" just means pain "associated with serious physical injury so severe that death, organ failure, or permanent damage" would result. That's who Kavanaugh thought should get a lifetime judicial appointment.
There's another more minor instance, though a a prospective Supreme Court justice’s lying can hardly ever be minimized. Kavanaugh repeatedly said in testimony on Wednesday that he didn't know how people would define the term "swing justice," meaning a Supreme Court justice whose positions aren't ideologically predictable. In yet another email from 2003, Kavanaugh talks about Justices Sandra Day O'Connor and William Rehnquist as being the "swing" votes on a case, a concept he is clearly familiar with since he's tossing it into an email.
In any other time, with any other Senate and any other president, this nominee would have been weeded out in the vetting process. We're not in normal times. As several Democrats pointed out, Kavanaugh wasn't on anyone's shortlist for the Supreme Court until late last year, just months after the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller. Along with all the baggage Kavanaugh is carrying—more than 90 percent of it being covered up by Republicans—he has been a vocal critic of investigations into sitting presidents.
Kavanaugh was nominated to protect Trump. Republicans are trying to rush him onto the court to protect Trump, and they don't care how much he lied to them to get there.