Kavanaugh Feared Looking ‘Silly’ on Flip-Flop on Presidential Records

The following article by Todd Ruger was posted on the Roll Call website August 13, 2018:

Boxes representing roughly 1 million pages of documents to be submitted to the committee on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Credit: Tom Williams, CQ Roll Call file photo

Long before the current Senate fight over access to presidential records as part of his Supreme Court nomination, Brett Kavanaugh sent an email to his co-workers in the White House counsel’s office about a soon-to-be-published article on access to presidential records that “makes me look very silly.”

Kavanaugh let the office know that Washington Post columnist Al Kamen planned to write a blurb to highlight how he had switched legal positions — now that he was a lawyer in the George W. Bush administration — when it comes to how much power former presidents and their families had to block the release of presidential records.

“I apologize in advance,” Kavanaugh wrote in the email, one of about 88,000 pages of documents about his work in the White House released Sunday as part of the confirmation process. “I will be screaming into a pillow at staff meeting in the morning. Uggghhhhh.”

View the complete article here.