Trump withholds 100,000 pages on Brett Kavanaugh's record, citing executive privilege

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh listens to US President Donald Trump announcing his nomination.

(Image credit: Mandel Ngan/Getty Images)

published 2 September 2018

The Trump administration is withholding more than 100,000 pages on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's record of legal work within the George W. Bush administration.

The White House decided to conceal these documents, citing executive privilege as its rationale, said William Burck, the head of a team of lawyers who reviewed some 664,000 pages of Kavanaugh-related documents housed in Bush's presidential library.

Most of the records not published "reflect deliberations and candid advice concerning the selection and nomination of judicial candidates, the confidentiality of which is critical to any president’s ability to carry out this core constitutional executive function," said Burck, who was appointed by Bush. They record direct comments to the former president, The New York Times reports, summarizing Burck, along with "communications between White House staff members about their discussions with Mr. Bush, and other internal deliberations."

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Congressional Democrats have cried foul, accusing President Trump of deceptively manipulating Kavanaugh's confirmation process. "We're witnessing a Friday night document massacre," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) tweeted Saturday. "President Trump's decision to step in at the last moment and hide 100k pages of Judge Kavanaugh's records from the American public is not only unprecedented in the history of SCOTUS noms, it has all the makings of a cover up."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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