Leahy's stolen emails

[Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) said Wednesday] that six emails from Kavanaugh’s time in the George W. Bush White House may contradict testimony Kavanaugh gave when being confirmed for his federal judgeships.

[...]

The six emails in question related to a scandal from 2002 and 2003 in which a Republican Judiciary Committee staffer named Manny Miranda stole emails from the committee’s Democrats that included strategy memos about how they would question Bush’s judicial nominees.

Leahy alleged that Kavanaugh, in his role preparing those judicial nominees for their confirmation hearings, knew he had received these stolen emails from Miranda detailing the Democrats’ strategy on the nomination of Priscilla Owen to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Kavanaugh claimed in both his 2004 and 2006 confirmation hearings that if he did receive those documents, he “never knew or suspected” that they were stolen.

  HuffPo

And Leahy pinned that bullshit to the table in his questioning when he noted the documents were delivered to Kavanaugh with the admonition to keep them confidential.

I've said before that I think Kavanaugh will be confirmed, and in the future impeached. He's done plenty of shady shit, and he's lied about it.  This is just one deal:

Leahy brought up an email sent on July 19, 2002, from Miranda to Kavanaugh and another Bush official that, according to the senator, asked “why the Leahy people were looking into financial ties between two special interest groups and Priscilla Owen.” Kavanaugh proceeded to read the email and concluded, “I don’t really have a specific recollection of any of this, senator, but it would have not have been unusual [to say] ... ‘The Leahy people are looking into this and the Hatch people are looking into that.’” Then Leahy asked about a January 2003 email. “Mr. Miranda forwarded you a letter from me and other Judiciary Democrats to then-Majority Leader Tom Daschle,” the senator said. “The letter was clearly a draft. It had typos and it wasn’t signed. Somebody eventually leaked its existence to Fox News.”

“Here’s the thing,” Leahy continued. “You had the full text of my email in your inbox before anything was said about it publicly. Did you find it at all unusual to receive a draft letter from Democratic senators to each other before any mention of it was made public?”

Kavanaugh pointed out that the only reply he made to this particular email was asking, “Who signed this?” According to Kavanaugh, this meant that he did not realize that the document was a draft and, therefore, remained oblivious that the document had been stolen.

Leahy then wanted to know if Miranda ever asked Kavanaugh to meet outside of the White House or the Capitol.

“I can’t rule that out,” Kavanaugh answered.

Leahy continued, “Did he ever hand you material separately from what would be emailed back and forth?”

“I don’t know the answer to that, senator,” Kavanaugh said before hemming and hawing about how sometimes the Democrats and Republicans on the committee worked together.

[...]

“When you worked at the White House did anyone ever tell you they had a mole that provided them with secret info?” Leahy asked.

Kavanaugh said he didn’t “recall the reference to a mole.”

Leahy got more specific: “You never received an email from a Republican staff member with information claiming to come from spying?”

“I’m not going to rule anything out,” Kavanaugh said, echoing previous denials. “If I did, I wouldn’t have thought the literal meaning of that.”

“Wouldn’t that surprise you that you got an email saying that they got that from somebody spying?” Leahy pressed.

Kavanaugh, realizing that Leahy was talking about a document without revealing it, responded with his own question: “Well, is there such an email, senator?”

That's where I would have blown a gasket.

This led Leahy to turn to Grassley: “We’d have to ask the chairman what he has in the confidential material.”

Grassley responded angrily that all of the documents that the committee has made public from Kavanaugh’s time in the White House counsel’s office are publicly available online. Leahy replied that the email he referenced is marked “committee confidential.” Grassley, angrily yelling, declared that 80 percent of the emails the committee got from the archives are available to the public.

Corrupt and festering.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.