Democrats raise alarm after 42K Kavanaugh documents released night before hearing

Democrats are expressing alarm over the Trump White House decision to claim executive privilege and withhold some 100,000 pages of documents from Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh's time with the George W. Bush administration.

That decision, relayed in a letter late Friday, just days before confirmation hearings are set to begin Tuesday, is a move top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer of New York called a "Friday night document massacre."

On Monday night, just hours before the hearings were set to begin, another 42,000 pages of Kavanaugh documents were released to the Senate, Schumer tweeted.

A spokesman for the Senate Judiciary Republicans said the amount of documents, including Monday's additions, is more than the last five confirmed nominees combined. Judiciary Republicans said they would be able to review the new documents without "issue."

"The Committee received another document production today, bringing the total volume of Executive Branch records to more than 480,000 pages, dwarfing the total Executive Branch material for the last five confirmed nominees combined. Our review team will be able to complete its examination of this latest batch in short order, before tomorrow's hearing begins," the spokesman said. "We've received records on a rolling basis. This production was roughly 42,000 pages of documents. I'd refer you to Mr. Burck's letter from last Friday, outlining the review process. Getting through this latest production before the hearing is not going to be an issue for us."

The spokesman also stated that in the past, some material has been received after the hearing.

In a statement, the Department of Justice said the "volume, depth, and breadth of the production of Judge Kavanaugh's documents far surpasses the much smaller and narrower productions for previous nominees."

"The Department of Justice, which has advised both Democratic and Republican administrations on the application of the Presidential Records Act and constitutional privileges, was responsible for determining which documents were produced to the Senate Judiciary Committee," the DOJ said.

More than 400,000 other pages had been previously handed over to the Senate Judiciary Committee, but Democrats say the withheld documents would give details and color to Kavanaugh's time as staff secretary and associate White House counsel in the Bush White House - when he was involved in some of its most controversial decisions and judicial nominations.

It's a time Democrats say is key in giving context to his time as a partisan Republican.

Before serving in the Bush White House, Kavanaugh had been a key deputy to Independent Counsel Ken Starr and advocated for tough questioning of President Bill Clinton about his sexual encounters with then-White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

Later, he said, after seeing the pressures inside the Bush White House, he wrote in a 2009 article for the Minnesota Law Review that any civil and criminal investigations of a president should be deferred until they're out of office because they're "time-consuming and distracting."

The just over 100,000 pages of material was withheld after the Trump White House "directed that we not provide these documents," wrote William Burck, the lawyer handling the document release on behalf of the Bush administration.

The Department of Justice and the White House said it had identified the documents to be within "constitutional privilege," Burck wrote in the letter, which was released by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Most of the documents "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," Burck wrote.

The documents that didn't concern judicial candidates, Burck wrote, contained "advice submitted directly" from Kavanaugh to Bush, conversations between White House staffers that disclosed conversations with the president and "substantive" discussions about executive orders or legislation.

Schumer called the "last moment" decision by President Trump "unprecedented in the history of [Supreme Court nominations]" and said it had "all the makings of a cover up."