Document requests in Brett Kavanaugh's nomination process

SCOTUS Vacancy, 2018
	Nominee
	Brett Kavanaugh
	Retiring Justice
	Anthony Kennedy
	Vacancy date
	July 31, 2018
	Confirmation date
	October 6, 2018
	Coverage
	Timeline; Confirmation hearings; Kavanaugh nomination; Process to fill the seat; Kennedy resignation
	See also
	Brett Kavanaugh; Supreme Court vacancy, 2017; Supreme Court of the United States

This page covers events related to document requests during the nomination process of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh. For full coverage of the nomination, click here.

Democrats and Republicans disagreed on the number of documents, as well as which ones, should be released prior to then-Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings. in July 2018, Democratic senators said they would not meet with Kavanaugh until they were assured they would receive documents particularly pertaining to the judge's time serving in the White House counsel office under the George W. Bush administration.^[1] Mitch McConnell (R) initially responded by telling senior Republicans if Democrats continued to push for the release of records, he was prepared to delay the confirmation vote until right before the November 2018 elections.^[2]

In early August, Democrats including Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D) and Dianne Feinstein (D) asked the National Archives to publicly release documents on Kavanaugh's time serving in the White House. They also filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for the records. National Archivist David Ferreiro responded that under the Presidential Records Act, archivists may only respond to records requests from committee chairs.^[3]^[4]^[5] In response, Schumer announced his caucus was prepared to sue the National Archives if it did not meet their FOIA request.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Sen. Chuck Grassley (R) also requested documents related to Kavanaugh's service under the Bush administration from the National Archives. They responded with a letter stating they could not complete the request until October 2018. The letter cited the amount of documents, which it estimated as 850,000 pages of email records, as the reason the request would take until then to fulfill.^[6] The National Archives did release 1,063 pages from Kavanaugh's attorney work files from his time in the office of independent counsel Kenneth Starr in the 1990s.^[7] Additionally, former President George W. Bush's team provided the committee with documents from Kavanaugh's time serving in the White House counsel office.^[8] The committee then publicly released 5,700 of the 125,000 of the documents.^[9]