Newly Revealed Emails Raise Fresh Objections to Kavanaugh Confirmation
Another group of newly available documents fueled questioning by Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, about Judge Kavanaugh’s work, from 2001 to 2003, with Manuel Miranda, a former Senate Republican aide who was forced to resign after he and another Republican Senate staff member infiltrated confidential files of Senate Judiciary Committee Democrats, including Mr. Leahy. The Republican aides clandestinely monitored files describing which of Mr. Bush’s judicial nominees the Democrats would try to block and with what tactics, copying thousands of them and passing some on to the news media.
During his confirmation hearings to be an appeals court judge in 2004 and 2006, Judge Kavanaugh had denied any knowledge of what Mr. Miranda had been doing, and he insisted again this week that nothing ever raised “red flags” with him about the information that Mr. Miranda was providing to him. But Mr. Leahy put out formerly secret emails about the two aides’ interactions.
The newly unmasked communications included a March 2003 email from Mr. Miranda to Judge Kavanaugh that included several pages of Democratic talking points, marked “not for distribution.” Another email to Judge Kavanaugh came from a Republican Senate staff member who used the subject line “spying” and referred to “a mole for us on the left.”
Still another email, released Thursday night by Mr. Booker, shows Mr. Miranda proposing a lunch meeting in July 2002 at a deli in downtown Washington with Judge Kavanaugh and a Justice Department official. There, he said, he could “provide useful info to map out Biden and Feinstein,” a reference to Senator Feinstein and Joseph R. Biden Jr., a senator at the time.
Judge Kavanaugh reiterated that he had no knowledge that Mr. Miranda had infiltrated Democratic files, saying he most likely assumed that the Republican staff was getting information from friends who were Democratic staff members, and nothing had raised red flags at the time.
Mr. Leahy scoffed, saying, “I was born at night, but not last night.” He added, “If I had something that somebody said, ‘we have stolen this’ or ‘don’t tell anybody we have this,’ I think it would raise some red flags.”
Mr. Leahy also pressed him about more than 100,000 documents from his period as a Bush White House lawyer that the Senate has not been permitted to see, even on a confidential basis, as the White House has cited executive privilege. Mr. Leahy asked whether Judge Kavanaugh could confirm that none of those contain more such emails from Mr. Miranda.