It's always the emails.
While Judge Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump's Supreme Court nominee to replace the retiring Anthony Kennedy, worked as an aide to former President George W. Bush, he produced tens of thousands of emails and memos that are public record. But Fix the Court, a Supreme Court watchdog group, said Monday that the documents are being withheld by the Department of Justice.
The group filed requests in 2017 to see "more than a million" documents from Kavanaugh's five years in the Bush White House, but the DOJ and the National Archives and Records Administration, tasked with preserving government records, hasn't released them. When Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan was first nominated to her seat, Talking Points Memo points out, all of her documents from her time working under former President Bill Clinton were published online. Those public records became a part of the debate over her eventual confirmation.
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All of Kavanaugh's public records, including documents from his time as a law clerk for Kennedy, should have been released by now, according to Freedom of Information laws. Fix the Court on Tuesday sued the federal government to uncover the records, criticizing officials as making it "as difficult as possible to obtain public records from Supreme Court nominees." The group urged the Trump administration to release Kavanaugh's documents immediately, "so the American people and their representatives in the Senate can make a more informed judgment on the nominee."
