Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was once so incensed by the idea that President Bill Clinton had perjured himself that he advised then independent counsel Ken Starr to lash Clinton with a withering line of graphic questions about his relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
“He has committed perjury (at least) in the [Paula] Jones case,” Kavanaugh, then a member of Starr's team, wrote in an August 1998 memo. "He should be forced to account for all of that and to defend his actions. It may not be our job to impose sanctions on him, but it is our job to make his pattern of revolting behavior clear — piece by painful piece."
The same white hot rage Kavanaugh once directed at a sitting Democratic president should now be turned on him, says Lisa Graves, a former Democratic Senate staffer whose emails were stolen and provided to the George W. Bush White House. In Slate, Graves writes:
Much of Washington has spent the week focusing on whether Judge Brett Kavanaugh should be confirmed to the Supreme Court. After the revelations of his confirmation hearings, the better question is whether he should be impeached from the federal judiciary.
Kavanaugh has demonstrably lied repeatedly about whether he received documents when he worked in the Bush White House that were clearly stolen from Democrats. His latest round of lies came this week, when he again denied knowingly getting access to stolen material. In response, Sen. Patrick Leahy released emails Kavanaugh received in 2002 from then GOP counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee Manuel Miranda and others utilizing the improperly obtained intelligence. One email to Kavanaugh even blared “spying” in the subject line. Overall, the documents outlined Democratic strategy and specific lines of questioning they planned to use to block some of President Bush's most controversial judicial nominees.
The problem isn't that Kavanaugh received the emails; it's that he refused to acknowledge having received them even after the wrongdoing had been discovered back in 2003, when a congressional investigation was launched. And he has lied about it ever since.
As of November 2003, when the sergeant-at-arms seized the Judiciary Committee’s servers, Kavanaugh would have been on notice that any of the letters, talking points, or research described as being from Democrats that were provided to him by Miranda were suspect and probably stolen from the Senate’s server.
But he did nothing. He did not come forward to the Senate to provide information about the confidential documents Miranda had given him, which were clearly from the Democrats.
Kavanaugh also apparently did nothing when the Senate referred the case to the U.S. attorney’s office for criminal prosecution. (Miranda was never prosecuted.)
Mere months after the Miranda scandal had blown up, Kavanaugh told the Judiciary Committee that he not only never knew about the stolen materials, but had also never been the recipient of any of them. The context is key, notes Graves.
Even if Kavanaugh could claim that he didn’t have any hint at the time he received the emails that these documents were of suspect provenance—which I personally find implausible—there is no reasonable way for him to assert honestly that he had no idea what they were after the revelation of the theft. Any reasonable person would have realized they had been stolen, and certainly someone as smart as Kavanaugh would have too.
But he lied.
Under oath.
And he did so repeatedly.
Significantly, he did so even though a few years earlier he had helped spearhead the impeachment of President Bill Clinton for perjury in a private civil case. Back then Kavanaugh took lying under oath so seriously that he was determined to do everything he could to help remove a president from office.
Now we know that he procured his own confirmation to the federal bench by committing the same offense. And he did so not in a private case but in the midst of public hearings for a position of trust, for a lifetime appointment to the federal judiciary.
Again and again, in history and in life, we run across people who are most agitated, most critical, and most judgmental of those who engage in the very behavior that they themselves have engaged in. It’s the mirror image that festers. Kavanaugh appears to be one of those people.
And soon he could be sitting on the highest court in the land, leveling his selective judgments on the rest of America.