Long before Brett Kavanaugh became a white supremacist criminal’s nominee for Supreme Court justice, he was a guy that lied about everything from illegal wiretapping of US citizens to the Bush-era torture policy that he was party to. If one is lucky, they only get to lie to a Senate committee once in their life. Brett Kavanaugh has perjured himself numerous times in front of Senate committees. He’s perjured himself so much that the Republican Party hasn’t stopped doing backflips to hide the evidence of his perjuries—while the SCOTUS nominee has continued to perjure himself during this past week’s Senate committee hearings. Some of the most damning bits of deceit Kavanaugh has indulged in were the lies he told and continues to tell about his knowledge, handling, and use of stolen memos related to Democratic strategy surrounding court nominations in 2004. In 2004 and 2006, Kavanaugh said not only that he had no idea about the stolen memos, but also that he had never even seen them.
This past week, faced with evidence that Kavanaugh had indeed been sent stolen memos, letters, and talking points by GOP Senate aide Manuel Miranda, Kavanaugh changed his tune and said he never “used’ memos that “appeared” to be from Democratic staffers. This by itself is an admission of perjury in the 2004 and 2006 incidents. But Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) produced the emails Kavanaugh received, showing that unless Brett Kavanaugh was illiterate and stupid and a dummy and stupid and dumb again, he had to know exactly how stolen they were. That’s stupid and dumb squared if you are keeping score.
Today, Lisa Graves wrote an op-ed in Slate magazine, titled “I Wrote Some of the Stolen Memos That Brett Kavanaugh Lied to the Senate About: He should be impeached, not elevated.” Graves was the chief counsel for nominations for the ranking member (then Sen. Leahy) on the United States Senate Judiciary Committee. She was the person who wrote many of the memos that were stolen and subsequently sent to people like Brett Kavanaugh—the man who was working on coming up with a court nominee strategy for then President George W. Bush. Graves argues that not only should Kavanaugh be dismissed as a candidate for the Supreme Court, but he should be dismissed from the judiciary entirely.
Receiving those memos and letters alone is not an impeachable offense.
No, Kavanaugh should be removed because he was repeatedly asked under oath as part of his 2004 and 2006 confirmation hearings for his position on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit about whether he had received such information from Miranda, and each time he falsely denied it.
Graves goes on to show the clip below from 2006, of the late Senator Ted Kennedy asking Kavanaugh if he regretted how those memos had been stolen, and the whole sordid affair. Kavanaugh, once again,denies culpability in anything related to the stolen memos, denies ever having seen them or handled them, and therefore denies any knowledge of their existence. In the clip, you can see Sen. Kennedy’s face as he is clearly gobsmacked at what he knows is perjury. But without the actual emails at the time to prove that Brett Kavanaugh was lying, Kavanaugh continued on his craven way.
Graves also takes umbrage at Kavanaugh’s characterization of the “norms” of the judicial nomination process. Kavanaugh implies that getting secret intel on what political adversaries were going to do is standard procedure.
As a Democrat who worked on those questions, I can say definitively that it was not typical at all. Kavanaugh knows this full well.
The fact of the matter, as Graves points out, is that even if you believe Kavanaugh didn’t know in 2004 that the memos he was being sent were stolen and illegally obtained, in 2006, he absolutely lied about knowing and receiving them, even when the cat was out of the bag.
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