Power Grab - Jason Chaffetz Page 0,34
public appearances
All books that used him as a resource
More than 500,000 pages of documents related to his past legal service in the executive branch
One-on-one meetings with Kavanaugh (65 senators took advantage of the opportunity).
Subsequently, senators heard thirty-two hours of testimony from Kavanaugh, then received responses to 1,300 post-hearing written questions. A memo from Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans notes this was “more questions than have been asked of all prior Supreme Court nominees combined.”
Even the White House, whose right to withhold documents under executive privilege was held sacrosanct by these same Democrats during the Obama administration, reported having turned over more documents on Kavanaugh than on the five previous nominees combined. The opposition had to know that executive privilege would apply to some of the documents that they were requesting. Nevertheless, the Democrats insisted that Kavanaugh was hiding something.
Feinstein doubled down on the Schumer tweet, releasing a statement the same day with the same gaslighting technique Schumer had used to make the public question the facts:
Scheduling a hearing in early September, while more than 99 percent of Kavanaugh’s records are still unavailable, is not only unprecedented but a new low in Republican efforts to stack the courts.
Aside from the obvious hyperbole of suggesting that Republicans filling Supreme Court vacancies constitutes “stacking the courts,” Feinstein’s numbers are problematic. The Washington Post called out the obvious exaggeration in her messaging, noting that she had to massage the numbers by excluding large volumes of documents produced to the Senate, but not made public. The Post also noted her false assumption that the White House record being held back was millions of pages more than it actually was. Furthermore, the Post correctly pointed out that many of the records not produced were duplicates of emails sent and received among multiple people.
Democrats would have you believe they were waiting to assiduously review every last page of every last document so they could be certain how they would vote. But if that were actually true, they probably would have shown up to see the documents that had already been produced. Especially the ones designated “committee confidential” that were considered too sensitive for public release. Did they? You won’t read about it in any mainstream source, but none other than Chairman Grassley himself provided the answer just before the hearings got under way:
“The most sensitive presidential records remain committee confidential under federal law just as they were during the nominations of Kagan or Gorsuch,” he said. “But we have expanded access to these documents. Also, instead of just providing access to committee members, we’ve provided access to all 100 senators. Instead of just providing access to a very few committee aides, we’ve provided access to all committee aides. And instead of just providing access to physical binders of paper, we’ve provided 24/7 digital and searchable access. This is unprecedented access to committee confidential material. I would also like to add that my staff set up work stations and have been available 24/7 to help senators who are not on the committee access confidential materials . . . but not one senator showed up.”
Any journalist with a laptop and a shred of integrity could have blown up the Senate Democrats’ false narrative with one story. (Of course, few did.) The document demands were nothing more than a ruse to delay the hearings and prop up the false narrative that Kavanaugh must be hiding something. But that would not stop Judiciary Committee Democrats and 2020 presidential hopefuls from doubling down on the overreach in the opening day of the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.
If this play sounds familiar, it’s because Schumer ran it again immediately after Attorney General William Barr released his summary of the Mueller report in late March 2019. Knowing that an investigation involving a foreign power would necessarily have to be redacted and that grand jury material is never made public, Democrats made a show of demanding the entire Mueller report with underlying documentation. They know it can’t all be produced. They don’t even necessarily disagree with the reasons. But if they want to run with a narrative that the Trump administration is “hiding something,” they have to create the appearance that they didn’t get everything they needed.
To this point in the confirmation process, the behavior of Democrats trying to stop the Kavanaugh nomination was aggressive, opportunistic, and misleading. But not necessarily unprecedented. All of that would change once the hearings got under way. That’s when a new narrative would need to be built—a narrative powerful enough to take