Senate

Booker releases new Kavanaugh documents not cleared for public

by Jordain Carney - 09/06/18 4:41 PM ET

Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) on Thursday released two tranches of documents from Brett Kavanaugh’s time as a White House lawyer that hadn’t been cleared for public release.

Booker released five pages of emails on Thursday that were stamped as “committee confidential,” meaning they cannot be discussed or released publicly.

{mosads}”Here are several more Kavanaugh ‘committee confidential’ documents,” Booker said in a tweet, linking to the new tranche of documents.

Here are several more Kavanaugh “committee confidential” documents: https://t.co/V2EgNRflTv

— Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) September 6, 2018

Hours later he released an additional 11 pages of emails, some of which had already been released publicly.

A spokesman for Grassley confirmed that the documents are still classified as “committee confidential.”

“And Sen. Booker made redactions that were not in the original documents, acknowledging their sensitive nature,” the spokesman said.

In one email from the second group of released documents, Kavanaugh says he is going to “vent” about changes to legislation impacting faith-based program funding.

“A religious drug treatment center should be no better, but also no worse, in the eyes of the government than a non-religious drug treatment center,” Kavanaugh wrote in an 2001 email.

“This administration should never be arguing, I would not think, that the Constitution actually prohibits a neutral funding scheme just because it may happen to fund religiously oriented programs as well as secular programs,” Kavanaugh continued.

The documents come after Booker released separate documents from Kavanaugh’s time as a lawyer for former President George W. Bush’s White House earlier Thursday.

Booker claimed that the documents were marked “committee confidential,” but GOP aides and Bill Burck, the Bush lawyer sorting through the paperwork, said they had been cleared for public release hours earlier.

Updated: 5:22 p.m.

Tags committee confidential Cory Booker Kavanaugh hearing