A Republican lawyer working for former President George W. Bush permitted the disclosure of 5,700 pages of White House files involving Brett Kavanaugh.
WASHINGTON — The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday released about 5,700 pages of documents involving Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh’s time as an associate White House counsel in the George W. Bush administration, as Democrats complained that the vast majority of such files remained hidden from public view.
It was not immediately clear whether the newly released files contained any significant revelations about Judge Kavanaugh, whom President Trump has nominated to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant by the retirement of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. Journalists and outside advocates from both sides have begun scouring them.
Many of the files appeared to be emails in which White House staff members were circulating news and opinion articles or setting up meetings.
The public release of the 5,700 pages was a first trickle from a larger trove of about 125,000 pages that a Republican lawyer working for former President Bush, William A. Burck, had turned over to the committee late last week.
Democrats have complained that Mr. Burck should not be involved in providing any historical government documents to the committee, and that only the National Archives and Records Administration, or NARA, should be deciding which files make it to the committee.
The archives is separately working through Bush-era White House documents to decide what to turn over, but has said it would take months for it to complete the review. Mr. Bush, who as the former president has a right to access files from his administration that are not yet public, has voluntarily begun providing some to the Senate in a parallel process.
In a letter on Wednesday, Mr. Burck said that the National Archives staff members were too busy working on the official committee request to consult on which pages from the files he had processed could be made public. So, he said, his team had determined that it was appropriate to make the 5,700 pages public, suggesting that they contain little sensitive information.
“In light of the constraints on NARA’s resources, and in the interest of expediting appropriate access to President Bush’s presidential records in furtherance of education and research about the Bush administration, we are producing to the committee on a rolling basis commencing today publicly releasable versions of documents that, in our view, do not contain information covered by a Presidential Records Act exemption or applicable privilege,” he wrote.
Under the Presidential Records Act, White House files are generally kept secret for the first 12 years after a president leaves office, meaning that Bush administration files are out of reach until January 2021. Former presidents also retain some authority to assert executive privilege to prevent Congress from seeing certain internal deliberative materials.
Judge Kavanaugh served as a White House lawyer from 2001 to 2003, and then as staff secretary to Mr. Bush from 2003 to 2006, when he was confirmed as a judge on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.
The Senate has been fighting over the speed of Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation process, a struggle that for now is playing out as two debates over access to documents — whether Mr. Burck should have any role in screening the files, as well as how many Bush-era documents from the National Archives will eventually be made available to the Senate.
Democrats have argued that all of his files from that entire period — potentially millions of pages — should be shown to the Judiciary Committee. But the panel’s chairman, Senator Charles Grassley, Republican of Iowa, has argued that the staff secretary files are too voluminous and not needed for senators to make a judgment about Judge Kavanaugh’s fitness to sit on the Supreme Court.
Mr. Burck — who was Mr. Kavanaugh’s deputy as staff secretary in the Bush White House — provided the 125,000 pages of files to the committee on the condition that they would treat them all as “confidential” and not make them public, a condition he lifted for the 5,700 pages made public on Thursday.
In a statement, Senator Charles Schumer, of New York, the Democratic minority leader, portrayed the committee’s engagement with and deference to Mr. Burck as part of a partisan cover-up of Judge Kavanaugh’s record.
“Not only is a massively conflicted Republican lawyer, who previously worked for Judge Kavanaugh, cherry-picking what documents the Senate Judiciary Committee can see, he is now telling the committee what the rest of the Senate and the American public can see — and Republicans are playing along,” he said. “We are seeing layer after layer of unprecedented secrecy in what is quickly becoming the least transparent nominations process in history.”
But a Republican Judiciary Committee staffer said the release was just the beginning of making public the files the committee received last week, and that more will be forthcoming.
