Brett Kavanaugh Wrote That Hiding Evidence From Congress Is an Impeachable Offense

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Apart from the impeachment proceedings, Trump has been litigating for months against virtually all demands for documents and information related to various types of potential presidential misconduct. Trump has also suffered a remarkable series of courtroom losses, often accompanied by emphatic judicial repudiations of his typically weak and overreaching arguments, and the lower court losses are now piling up before the Supreme Court.

Based on his past work as a member of Ken Starr’s team during the investigation of Bill Clinton, it is clear that Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh would emphatically disagree with Trump’s efforts to benefit from this obstruction of Congress.

Starr assigned Kavanaugh to play a key role in authoring Starr’s report to Congress, which included a section setting forth potential bases for impeaching the president; among them was a claim that Clinton should be impeached for going to court to assert the executive privilege in the first place. According to Starr and Kavanaugh, the privilege assertion was itself impeachable, because it was purportedly meritless and Clinton had managed to use the privilege litigation to delay Starr’s investigation. As the Starr Report put it, the temporary delay amounted to an illicit “conceal[ment]” by Clinton of his “personal misconduct.” Starr and Kavanaugh also argued that Clinton should be impeached because he refused to voluntarily testify himself, despite the fact that (unlike Trump) Clinton ultimately testified after receiving a subpoena; once again, mere delay was deemed potentially impeachable.

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