WASHINGTON (AP) - The Latest on Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh (all times local):
8:45 p.m.
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh said in a newly released White House email that limits on campaign contributions to candidates “have some constitutional problems.” The Supreme Court upheld contribution limits more than 40 years ago.
Documents from March 2002 that were made public Friday night in advance of next week’s confirmation hearing show Kavanaugh’s skepticism about campaign finance regulations. That puts him in line with the court’s conservative justices, who have struck down a variety of limits since 2006.
But the court has left in place contribution limits to candidates for president and Congress. Kavanaugh acknowledged in his email exchange with a White House colleague that he hadn’t heard many people question limits on contributions to candidates. But Kavanaugh said he tends “to think those limits have some constitutional problems.”
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8:40 p.m.
The Trump administration is withholding more than 100,000 pages of Brett Kavanaugh’s records from the Bush White House on the basis of presidential privilege ahead of the Supreme Court nominee’s confirmation hearing.
The Senate Judiciary Committee was notified of the action Friday. George W. Bush’s attorney Bill Burck told the panel it had essentially completed its work compiling documents, according to a letter obtained by The Associated Press. Bush directed them to err “on the side of transparency and disclosure, and we believe we have done so.”
But the current administration is also able to review the records, and the Trump White House “has directed that we not provide these documents,” the letter says.
In all, 267,000 pages of Kavanaugh documents from his Bush years are being made public.
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