It would be the absolute pinnacle of irony if the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh as the next Supreme Court Justice was stalled or even derailed completely by the man whose job was stolen by the judge that came just before Kavanaugh — and it looks like that is a very real possibility.
On Monday, the Democratic Coalition and its co-founders Scott Dworkin and Jon Cooper are filing a judicial ethics complaint against Kavanaugh in the Washington, DC Circuit Court over evidence that the would-be Justice lied to Congress and committed perjury before the Senate Judiciary. Access to the filing was obtained by DC Tribune yesterday.
The complaint is based on a 2002Â case in which Manuel Miranda, a Republican staffer on the Senate Judiciary Committee, stole thousands of documents belonging to Democrats on that same committee. Miranda worked with Judge Kavanaugh, who was at the time a White House lawyer, processing judicial nominations.
Internal emails between Miranda and Kavanaugh show that the judge understood the information he was being passed from Miranda in 2002 was “confidential” and derived “from Democrat sources.” But in sworn testimony in 2004, then again in 2006, Kavanaugh denied ever having had knowledge of the source of the information — data that ONLY could have come from the stolen emails — until the case was made public in late 2003.
Now Kavanaugh has tripled down on his insistence that he was unaware of the source of the information he illegally used all those years ago and done so again in sworn testimony before the Senate Judiciary — this time just a few days ago during his confirmation hearings.
The evidence against Kavanaugh is plentiful, and meshes with other complaints that have arisen in parallel against the judge for similar facts he’s concealed and continues to conceal during his confirmation hearings. In fact, it could all be discovered in court in short order — if Donald Trump weren’t claiming executive privilege in order to shield more than 100,000 pages of information about Kavanaugh’s time in the Bush White House from public scrutiny.
But the best part of all of this procedure, the icing on the cake, if you will, is who the presiding judge will be that oversees this case.
That would be one Merrick Garland, the Chief Judge of the DC Circuit Court. That’s the judge that Barack Obama nominated to the court after the death of Justice Antonin Scalia — the one that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell somehow knew not to even hold a hearing for, since he somehow knew that the next President would be a Republican, and the GOP could nominate a far more conservative judge to the Supreme Court.
Is it too cutesy for us to call this real justice?
Featured image via screen capture
