Top Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday requested the production of documents from Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanugh’s tenure as a White House lawyer. They pointed specifically to materials that were either withheld or not requested by the Senate during Kavanaugh’s confirmation fight.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler (D-NY) and Rep. Hank Johnson (D-GA), who chairs the Judiciary subcommittee overseeing the courts, sent the request to National Archives and Records Administration.
The Democrats’ letter said the documents were relevant to ethics and transparency legislation Congress is considering for the federal judiciary. The request pointed to the materials from Kavanaugh’s time as a staff secretary to President George W. Bush, which were not among the records requested by then-Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-IA) when Kavanaugh’s nomination was before his committee.
Grassley requested the records from Kavanaugh’s time in Bush’s White House Counsel’s Office, which preceded the staff secretary role. But only some of those records were made available to the committee, after a personal attorney for Kavanaugh conducted a review of them himself.
“As a result of this process, the Senate Judiciary Committee received only a small fraction of Justice Kavanaugh’s White House records before voting on his nomination,” the Democrats said.
The House members requested production on a rolling basis — starting with the White House Counsel Office materials covered under Grassley’s original request — and said that they would work with the archive agency to streamline the process for the staff secretary document production.
Read the letter below:
