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Brett Kavanaugh in memo argued against indicting sitting president

Brett Kavanaugh

Confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh will begin the day after Labor Day, Republicans said, sparking Democratic objections that they are rushing the process without properly delving into his background. The announcement Friday came amid the release of new documents from Kavanaugh’s time on the Kenneth Starr team investigating Bill Clinton. The records reveal his resistance to issuing an indictment of a sitting president. On Christmas Eve 1998, Kavanaugh drafted an “Overall Plan” to colleagues providing his thoughts on bringing the independent counsel office’s work to a close and suggesting they inform the attorney general that the findings against Clinton be left to the next president. “We believe an indictment should not be pursued while the President is in Office,” Kavanaugh wrote. The memo, tucked toward the end of nearly 10,000 pages, provides greater insight into Kavanaugh’s views on executive power that are expected to feature prominently in the Senate confirmation hearings. Democrats have warned that Kavanaugh may be unwilling to protect special counsel Robert Mueller’s ongoing probe of Russian interference in the 2016 election. On Friday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he hopes to have President Donald Trump’s nominee confirmed to replace retired Justice Anthony Kennedy before the new court session begins Oct. 1. “We’re moving right along,” McConnell said during a radio interview in Kentucky ahead of the announcement. “He’ll get confirmed. It won’t be a landslide, but he’ll get confirmed.” The Judiciary Committee will hold up to four days of review, with Kavanaugh to begin facing questions on Day 2, Sept. 5, said committee chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley. Kavanaugh’s appearance will be followed by testimony from legal experts and people who know the judge. The White House, which is determined to have Kavanaugh confirmed before the November elections as Republicans aim to deliver on Trump’s priorities, applauded the schedule announcement. But Democrats want access to more documents from Kavanaugh’s past as a judge and as an official in the George W. Bush administration. Grassley, R-Iowa, said there’s “plenty of time” to review documents but now it’s time for Americans “to hear directly” from Kavanaugh. “He’s a mainstream judge,” Grassley said. “He has a record of judicial independence and applying the law as it is written.” So far, the committee has made public Kavanaugh’s 17,000-page questionnaire and his more than 300 court cases as an appellate judge. The panel has additionally received 174,000 pages from his work for Bush in the White House counsel’s office. The new documents Friday provide a glimpse into Kavanaugh’s years on the Starr team shuttling back and forth to Little Rock for “investigative purposes.” He co-wrote a detailed, nearly 300-page memo on deputy White House counsel Vince Foster’s suicide. Hundreds of pages in the Starr files are grand jury proceedings that are redacted. Meanwhile, most of the White House records related to Kavanaugh are being held on a “committee confidential” basis, with just 5,700 pages from his White House years released this week to the public. Democrats say the Republicans are relying on the cherry-picked files being released primarily by Bush’s lawyer, Bill Burck, who is compiling and vetting the documents, rather than the traditional process conducted by the National Archives and Records Administration. The Archives has said its review of some 1 million pages of Kavanaugh records the committee requested will not be fully available until the end of October. The Archives produced the Starr files. The top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, said scheduling the hearing before the documents are ready “is not only unprecedented but a new low in Republican efforts to stack the courts.” She said, “It’s clear that Republicans want to speed this nomination through before we know who Brett Kavanaugh is.” Nan Aron, president of the Alliance for Justice, called it “jaw-dropping.” “It means that the chairman is telling the American people that this hearing is barreling forward, no matter what, no matter how little information is available to the Senate and public or how many shortcuts the committee has to take,” she said. The White House on Friday welcomed the news of a set date for confirmation hearings. “With the Senate already reviewing more documents than for any other Supreme Court nominee in history, Chairman Grassley has lived up to his promise to lead an open, transparent and fair process,” said White House spokesman Raj Shah. “Judge Kavanaugh looks forward to addressing the Judiciary Committee in public hearings for the American people to view.” Kavanaugh, 53, is a conservative who could tip the court’s balance for a generation and play a decisive role on issues like abortion access, gay marriage and executive branch oversight. He has met privately with almost all the Republican senators and one Democrat as supporters try to build momentum for confirmation. Because his career has largely been spent in public service, Kavanaugh has an unusually voluminous paper trail. Democrats are particularly pushing for access to his three years as staff secretary for Bush, but Republicans are not including those documents in the review. GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah said they are conducting the “most thorough vetting process for a nominee in the history of the Supreme Court.” Edwin Meese, the former attorney general to President Ronald Reagan, said, “Democratic senators have the time and they have the material. They have no excuse to obstruct his prompt confirmation.” Republished with the permission of the Associated Press.

Shifting strategy, Democrats to begin meeting with Brett Kavanaugh

Donald Trump_Brett Kavanaugh

After weeks of refusing to meet with Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, Democrats in the Senate plan to begin meeting with him when they start returning to Washington in mid-August, a senior Democratic aide said Friday. The aide said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee tasked with holding hearings for Kavanaugh, will be among those meeting with him. Only one Democratic senator, Joe Manchin of West Virginia, has met with Kavanaugh as lawmakers sparred over access to records from the nominee’s time as White House staff secretary under President George W. Bush. Kavanaugh’s lengthy public record has emerged as a key battleground as senators scrutinize the 53-year-old appellate judge, a conservative whose views on gay marriage, abortion and executive power could move the court rightward for a generation. The National Archives and Records Administration is compiling records from Kavanaugh’s time in the White House counsel’s office. But leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee are at odds over what records should be turned over from Kavanaugh’s time as Bush’s staff secretary. A senior Democratic aide said the senators will demand the records in dispute from Kavanaugh directly and question him about their contents during their meetings with him. The aide said Democrats also intend to demand that Kavanaugh call for and support the release of all of his files from his time in the White House, and to urge the National Archives and former President Bush to adhere to the same standard used in Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan’s confirmation. The aide spoke on the condition of anonymity to speak freely on strategy. Republicans have fought the release of all the Bush-era staff secretary documents saying there are plenty of other files on his record. Already the committee is poised to release more than 125,000 pages from Kavanaugh’s time in the White House counsel’s office during the Bush years, and on Friday it requested another 20,000 from his time on the Kenneth Starr team investigating President Bill Clinton. Earlier, some 17,000 pages were released from his questionnaire as well as more from his 300-plus cases as an appellate judge. The White House greeted the news that Senate Democrats would begin meeting with Kavanaugh by saying its requests for meetings between Kavanaugh and Schumer and Feinstein have remained unanswered for more than three weeks. “While we look forward to potential meetings, both of these Democratic senators and many of their colleagues have publicly opposed Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination, while continuing to disingenuously demand millions of pages of documents from former President Bush that are irrelevant to evaluating the judge’s judicial thinking,” said White House spokesman Raj Shah. Meanwhile, David Ferriero, archivist of the United States, told Schumer that the National Archives cannot provide Democrats with non-public records covering Kavanaugh’s time as staff secretary. He said such a request must come from the Republican chairman of the Judiciary Committee, or the committee itself. He said in a letter to Schumer dated Thursday that the practice is based on a 2001 Justice Department legal opinion. Ferriero said the National Archives declined to process similar requests from the lead Republicans on the Judiciary Committee in connection with the nominations of Attorney General Eric Holder and Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan during the administration of President Barack Obama. The National Archives holds millions of pages of records related to Kavanaugh, significantly more than for prior Supreme Court nominees who worked in the White House. Republicans have been pressuring Democratic senators up for re-election this year to meet with Kavanaugh, particularly in states that President Donald Trump won in 2016. The office of Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., confirmed Friday that she has a meeting scheduled with Kavanaugh on Aug. 21. Trump won Missouri in 2016. Republished with the permission of the Associated Press.

Donald Trump picks Brett Kavanaugh for court, setting up fight with Democrats

Donald Trump_Brett Kavanaugh

President Donald Trump chose Brett Kavanaugh, a solidly conservative, politically connected judge, for the Supreme Court Monday night, setting up a ferocious confirmation battle with Democrats as he seeks to shift the nation’s highest court ever further to the right. A favorite of the Republican legal establishment in Washington, Kavanaugh, 53, is a former law clerk for retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. Like Trump’s first nominee last year, Justice Neil Gorsuch, Kavanaugh would be a young addition who could help remake the court for decades to come with rulings that could restrict abortion, expand gun rights and roll back key parts of Obamacare. “He is a brilliant jurist, with a clear and effective writing style, universally regarded as one of the finest and sharpest legal minds of our time,” Trump said in his prime-time televised White House announcement. He added: “There is no one in America more qualified for this position, and no one more deserving.” With Kavanaugh, Trump is replacing a swing vote on the nine-member court with a staunch conservative. Kavanaugh, who serves on the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, is expected to be less receptive to abortion and gay rights than Kennedy was. He also has taken an expansive view of executive power and has favored limits on investigating the president. Speaking at the White House, Kavanaugh pledged to preserve the Constitution and said that “a judge must be independent and must interpret the law, not make the law. A judge must interpret the Constitution as written.” A senior White House official said Trump made his final decision on the nomination Sunday evening, then phoned Kavanaugh to inform him. The official said Trump decided on Kavanaugh because of his large body of jurisprudence cited by other courts, describing him as a judge that other judges read. On Monday, Trump phoned retiring Justice Kennedy to inform him that his former law clerk would be nominated to fill his seat. Trump signed Kavanaugh’s nomination papers Monday evening in the White House residence. Top contenders had included federal appeals judges Raymond Kethledge, Amy Coney Barrett and Thomas Hardiman. Some conservatives have expressed concerns about Kavanaugh, questioning his commitment to social issues like abortion and noting his time serving under President George W. Bush as evidence he is a more establishment choice. But his supporters have cited his experience and wide range of legal opinions. With Democrats determined to vigorously oppose Trump’s choice, the Senate confirmation battle is expected to dominate the months leading up to November’s midterm elections. Senate Republicans hold only a 51-49 majority, leaving them hardly any margin if Democrats hold the line. Democratic senators running for re-election in states Trump carried in 2016 will face pressure to back his nominee. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called Kavanaugh “a superb choice” and said senators would start meeting with him this week. Some Republican senators had favored other options. Rand Paul of Kentucky had expressed concerns but tweeted that he looked forward to meeting with Kavanaugh “with an open mind.” Democrats and liberal advocacy groups quickly lined up in opposition. Signaling the fight ahead on abortion rights, Dawn Laguens, executive vice president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said in a statement: “There’s no way to sugarcoat it: With this nomination, the constitutional right to access safe, legal abortion in this country is on the line. The White House invited a number of senators to attend the Monday night announcement. Democrats who were invited but declined included Sens. Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Doug Jones of Alabama, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Dianne Feinstein of California. Feinstein is the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. The others are Republican targets for the confirmation vote who come from Trump-won states where they face re-election this fall. Democrats have turned their attention to pressuring two Republicans, Sens. Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, to oppose any nominee who threatens Roe v. Wade. The two have supported access to abortion services. Kavanaugh is likely to be more conservative than Justice Kennedy on a range of social issues. At the top of that list is abortion. A more conservative majority could be more willing to uphold state restrictions on abortion, if not overturn the 45-year-old landmark Roe v. Wade decision that established a woman’s constitutional right. Kennedy’s replacement also could be more willing to allow states to carry out executions and could support undoing earlier court holdings in the areas of racial discrimination in housing and the workplace. Kennedy provided a decisive vote in 2015 on an important fair housing case. Like the other eight justices on the court, Kavanaugh has an Ivy League law degree, spending his undergraduate and law school years at Yale. Since 2006, he has been a judge on the federal appeals court in Washington. He also was a key aide to Kenneth Starr during Starr’s investigation of President Bill Clinton, worked on behalf of George W. Bush’s campaign during the election recount in 2000 and served in the Bush White House. Kavanaugh’s many written opinions provide insight into his thinking and also will be fodder for Senate Democrats who will seek to block his confirmation. He has written roughly 300 opinions as a judge, authored several law journal articles, regularly taught law school classes and spoken frequently in public. Kavanaugh’s views on presidential power and abortion are expected to draw particular attention in his confirmation hearing. Drawing on his experience working on the Clinton investigation and then in the Bush White House, he wrote in a 2009 law review article that he favored exempting presidents from facing both civil suits and criminal investigations, including indictment, while in office. That view has particular relevance as special counsel Robert Mueller is looking into Russian meddling in the 2016 election and whether the Trump campaign played any role in a foreign interference plot. On abortion, Kavanaugh voted in October to delay an abortion for a teenage immigrant who was in government

Who are the four Supreme Court contenders Donald Trump has met so far?

US Supreme Court

President Donald Trump has interviewed four prospective Supreme Court justices so far. Who are they? Amy Coney Barrett Barrett, 46, was a former law clerk to Justice Antonin Scalia and a longtime Notre Dame Law School professor. At her confirmation hearing last fall to become an appellate court judge, Democrats peppered Barrett on whether her Roman Catholic faith would interfere with her work. Democrats cited a 1998 paper in which she argued that Catholic judges might need to recuse themselves in death penalty cases. Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California told Barrett that dogma and law are two different things and she was concerned “that the dogma lives loudly within you.” Barrett was eventually confirmed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago after telling senators that her views had since broadened. She said it was never permissible for a judge to “follow their personal convictions in the decision of a case, rather than what the law requires.” Brett Kavanaugh Kavanaugh, 53, is a Yale-educated appellate court judge for the District of Columbia who recently wrote a dissent when his colleagues allowed an immigrant teen in U.S. custody to have an abortion. But he’s probably best known for helping independent counsel Kenneth Starr during the impeachment probe of President Bill Clinton and his ties to President George W. Bush. A former clerk to Justice Anthony Kennedy, Kavanaugh worked on behalf of the Bush campaign during the 2000 election recount, later taking a job in the White House counsel office and as staff secretary. When he was confirmed to the federal appeals court in D.C. in 2006, Bush took the unusual step of hosting a Rose Garden swearing-in ceremony with 120 guests to celebrate. At the time, Democrats panned Kavanaugh as a political operative who was being elevated to the court to provide a rubber stamp for Bush’s executive actions. Raymond Kethledge Kethledge, 51, is a former Kennedy law clerk and appeals court judge who graduated from the University of Michigan and its law school. He serves as a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit in Cincinnati, Ohio. He co-authored a book with Army veteran Michael Erwin of The Positivity Project published last year called “Lead Yourself First: Inspiring Leadership Through Solitude” in which he describes himself as an introvert. In an interview with the legal news site “Above the Law,” Kethledge said “I love to write” and prefers working from his barn office in northern Michigan overlooking Lake Huron without an internet connection. He said he found it “distracting” to his work in 2016 when he found himself on Trump’s short list of nominees to replace Scalia, a job that eventually went to Justice Neil Gorsuch. In the 1990s, Kethledge was counsel to Republican Sen. Spencer Abraham of Michigan, who became Bush’s energy secretary. Kethledge eventually founded a boutique litigation firm with two partners in Troy, Michigan. He was nominated to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in 2006 and confirmed in 2008. Amul Thapar Thapar, 49, is a federal appeals court judge from Kentucky who is close to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. He was Trump’s first judicial nomination to a district or appeals court, and on Trump’s short list to replace Scalia last year, losing out to Gorsuch. In one of his more interesting court cases, Thapar in 2014 as a district court judge in Kentucky sentenced an elderly nun to almost three years in prison for breaking into a U.S. storehouse for bomb-grade uranium and splashing blood on the walls of the bunker. She argued she was acting as a follower of Jesus Christ; Thapar said that provided no excuse for breaching the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. (An appeals court later threw out the sabotage charge, leaving the lesser charge of injuring government property and releasing her from prison early.) An alumnus of Boston College and the University of California, Berkeley, law school, Thapar was nominated by Trump to the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals. Republished with the permission of the Associated Press.

Senators press Trump officials on safeguarding 2018 ballots

Kristjen Nielsen, Jeh Johnson

With the 2018 elections already underway, senators chided the current and former secretaries of Homeland Security on Wednesday for not more strongly warning the American public about past Russian intrusions in state election systems and for a lack of urgency to protect balloting this year. Kirstjen Nielsen, President Donald Trump’s secretary of Homeland Security, testified alongside Jeh Johnson, secretary under former President Barack Obama, as the Senate intelligence committee launched an effort to protect the country’s election security after Russian agents targeted election systems in 21 states ahead of the 2016 general election. There’s no evidence that any hack in the November 2016 election affected election results, but the attempts rattled state election officials and prompted the federal government and states to examine the way votes are counted. Senators on the panel have criticized both administrations for not moving quickly enough to stem the Russian threat, and continued to do so at the hearing. Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican, critiqued Nielsen’s opening statement, which described a series of efforts the department had already announced. “I hear no sense of urgency to really get on top of this issue,” Collins said, noting that 2018 elections are already underway. Collins noted that many state election officials have remained without security clearances, making it harder for the department to share information with them. To speed up communications and intelligence sharing, the department has been working to grant security clearances to up to three election officials in each state. Nielsen said Wednesday that just 20 of those officials have been granted full clearances. “We are doing our best to speed up the process,” Nielsen said, adding that the department has a policy in place to provide information on immediate threats to state and local election officials even if clearances have yet to be granted. Communication and intelligence sharing by the federal government has been a key concern among state and local election officials. Those officials complained that it took the federal government nearly a year to inform them whether their states had been targeted by Russian hackers. Collins, who has introduced legislation with other members of the committee to improve election cybersecurity, also pressed Johnson, asking if he should have issued stronger warnings in 2016 as it became clear that Russians were trying to intrude into the systems. Johnson defended the way he alerted state and local election officials, noting that in the late summer and fall of 2016 he was repeatedly issuing public warnings for those officials to get cybersecurity assistance from the department. “We were beating the drum pretty hard,” Johnson said. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, also lambasted the Obama administration’s response, saying it was not sufficient to warn the public “in any way, shape or form.” Before leaving office, the Obama administration designated the nation’s election systems as “critical infrastructure,” on par with the electrical grid and water supply. That decision prompted alarm among state election officials, who expressed concern the federal government was trying to take over elections that have long been the jurisdiction of state and local governments. Johnson said he had considered the move earlier, but had backed off because of resistance to states. Johnson also testified that during the 2016 election he contacted The Associated Press because he was worried about the possibility the news cooperative’s election results could be hacked. He said he called AP’s CEO Gary Pruitt about his concerns and came away satisfied that the company was taking appropriate precautions as it counted votes and analyzed results. The hearing follows a Tuesday news conference in which committee members from both parties said government efforts to protect state and local elections from Russian cyberattacks haven’t gone far enough. Top U.S. intelligence officials have said they’ve seen indications Russian agents are preparing a new round of election interference this year. Senators warned that it could be worse the next time around. “What it looks like is a test,” said Maine Sen. Angus King of the 2016 hacking attempts. The committee is recommending that states make sure voting machines have paper audit trails and aren’t capable of being connected to the internet. Senators also are pushing for better communication among the various U.S. intelligence agencies and federal, state and local governments. Senators are also urging state and local election officials to take advantage Homeland Security Department resources, such as comprehensive risk assessments and remote cyberscanning of their networks to spot vulnerabilities. As of last month, just 14 states had requested risk assessments and 30 had asked for remote cyberscans of their networks, according to Homeland Security officials. But even that was straining resources, since many of those risk assessments have not been completed. The committee’s recommendations preview an election security report expected to be released in full in the coming weeks. It is the first of four reports planned as part of the panel’s wide-ranging investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election. The recommendations come as Congress is eyeing $380 million in state grants for election security in a wide-ranging spending bill expected to be unveiled as soon as Wednesday. The bill also contains $307 million for the FBI to go after Russian cyberattacks. The top Democrat on the intelligence panel, Virginia Sen. Mark Warner, has said he thinks the nation’s election security needs to be more robust, especially since Trump has not addressed the matter as an urgent problem. “It’s pretty amazing to me we’ve had the director of the FBI, the director of national intelligence and the head of the NSA say in public testimony within the last month that they’ve received no direction from the White House to make election security a priority,” Warner said. Nielsen defended Trump at the hearing, saying, “the line he is drawing is that no votes were changed. That doesn’t mean there’s not a threat.” She added: “We think the threat remains high.” Republished with the permission of the Associated Press.

Senate Democrats escalate fight over Jeff Sessions after Donald Trump fires Sally Yates

Chuck Grassley, Dianne Feinstein, and Patrick Leahy

Senate Democrats doubled-down on their opposition to President Donald Trump‘s pick for attorney general, Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions, questioning his independence following Trump’s Monday night dismissal of the acting attorney general Sally Yates for refusing to enforce his executive order on immigration. The vote on Sessions’ nomination has been delayed until Wednesday. Democratic senators spent several hours Tuesday morning detailing the reservations they have about Sessions’ ability to be an independent attorney general, serving as a power-check to Trump who already believe is already pushing the bounds of his executive powers. “That is what an attorney general must be willing and able to do,” said  the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, California-Democrat Sen. Dianne Feinstein. “I have no confidence Sen. Sessions will do that. Instead he has been the fiercest, most dedicated and most loyal promoter in Congress of the Trump agenda.” “Will he support and defend these broad and disruptive executive orders? Will he carry out and enforce the president’s actions that may very well violate the Constitution? It’s not difficult to assess that he will,” Feinstein concluded. Vermont-Democrat Sen. Patrick Leahy joined in voicing his opposition. “What we saw last night demonstrates what is at stake with this nomination,” said Leahy during the Tuesday morning meeting. “The attorney general is the people’s attorney. Not the president’s attorney. He or she does not wear two hats at once. I have very serious doubts that Senator Sessions would be an independent attorney general,” Leahy added. The Committee vote on Sessions’ nomination will now take place 10:30 a.m. Wednesday.

Senators squabble over Jeff Sessions record before AG confirmation hearing

Top senators are demanding more time to go over Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions’ record ahead of his confirmation hearings, which are set for Jan. 10 and Jan. 11 next year. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who is set to be the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee next year, said Tuesday that there is not enough time to go over the 150,000 pages of material Sessions sent to the committee. “This is more than 100 times what Attorney General [Loretta] Lynch produced (1,500 pages) and more than 29 times what [former] Attorney General [Eric] Holder produced (5,100 pages),” the senator said in a letter to Committee Chair Chuck Grassley. “I am sure you would agree that staff must have sufficient time to do the due diligence on any nominee for this vital position—and this due diligence will likely take longer than the review for recent, prior nominees who had less materials to analyze.” Feinstein also criticized the documents provided for not including some of unsavory parts of Sessions’ career, such as his failed 1986 bid for a federal judgeship and copies of speeches given in support of President-elect Donald Trump on the campaign trail. Grassley pointed out that many of the documents given to the committee have been publically available for years, and noted that Holder was allowed to add documents ahead of his confirmation without delaying his hearings. “Any suggestion that a nominee’s good faith efforts to locate and produce responsive material is cause for delay begins to look like a call for delay for delay’s sake, rather than a thorough review of a colleague’s character and qualifications,” Grassley said. Grassley also rebuffed Feinstein’s complain that Sessions didn’t include a list of political candidates and campaigns he has supported. “There can be no surprise that a sitting U.S. Senator is politically active,” he said.

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