“How much perjury is too much perjury from a Supreme Court nominee?”
That was how one commentator responded to a flurry of new documents and emails released on Thursday by Sens. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) that appear to show President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath during hearings for his nomination to the US Court of Appeals in 2004 and 2006.
In 2004 — after a Senate sergeant-at-arms report found that Republican staffer Manuel Miranda had stolen confidential communications and documents from Democratic senators — Kavanaugh told the Senate that he never received “documents that appeared…to have been drafted or prepared by Democratic staff members.”
But new emails made public by Leahy on Thursday appear to show that Kavanaugh “got 8 pages of material taken verbatim from [the Vermont senator’s] files, obviously written by Dem staff, labeled ‘not [for] distribution.” The stolen material detailed Democrats’ efforts to oppose President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees.
BREAKING: Kavanaugh testified he never received any docs that even “appeared to … have been drafted or prepared by Democratic staff.” Well, he got 8 pages of material taken VERBATIM from my files, obviously written by Dem staff, LABELED “not [for] distribution”. pic.twitter.com/eFlIBZ0Z1W
— Sen. Patrick Leahy (@SenatorLeahy) September 6, 2018
During Wednesday’s confirmation hearing, Leahy confronted Kavanaugh over the apparent contradiction between these emails and the judge’s 2004 testimony, but Leahy said he was not permitted to make the emails public because they were deemed “committee confidential.”
The documents were released on Thursday, however, and they show that Kavanaugh received an email that detailed information gathered by a “mole for us on the left” — an indication that the information was acquired…