Opinion | Brett Kavanaugh misled the Senate under oath. I cannot support his nomination.
September 13
Patrick Leahy, a Democrat, represents Vermont in the U.S. Senate.
Last week, I uncovered new evidence that Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh misled the Senate during his earlier hearings for the D.C. Circuit Court by minimizing and even denying his involvement in Bush-era controversies. I gave him the opportunity to correct his testimony at his hearing last week; he chose instead to double down.
I make no claim that Kavanaugh is a bad person. But when his prior confirmation to our nation’s “second highest court” was in jeopardy, he repeatedly misled the Senate when the truth might have placed that job out of reach.
Take his relationship with the ringleader of the “Memogate” scandal. Between 2001 and 2003, two Republican staffers
regularly gained unauthorized access to the private computer files of six Democratic senators, including mine, taking 4,670 files on controversial judicial nominees.
Kavanaugh was asked more than 100 times about this scandal in 2004 and 2006. He testified repeatedly that he knew nothing about the source of the information; that he received nothing that even appeared to be prepared by Democratic staff; and that he never suspected anything unusual, or “untoward.”
But
emails I released last week show that then-Republican Senate Judiciary Committee counsel Manuel Miranda regularly shared obviously ill-gotten, inside information with Kavanaugh, which Miranda often asked be kept secret.