I posted this as a partial update in the Booker/Lee thread from this morning, but felt that it deserved more attention given the ridiculous scene that Booker made this morning.
Shannon Bream is reporting that the documents Booker was willing to fall on his sword for in order to be released, were in fact already cleared to be released at 4am this morning, 5.5 hours before the hearing every began.
Senate Judiciary Committee staffers tell our @GriffJenkins that the documents SenBooker released today were already agreed to and cleared late LAST NIGHT. Not clear exactly which senators knew that before Booker publicly announced he was willing to violate policy and release.
— Shannon Bream (@ShannonBream) September 6, 2018
She just explained this in more detail on Fox News:
She points out that Booker may not have known that this document had been released, as Cornyn admitted he didn’t know until after the exchange took place. But Booker won’t respond to Fox News in order to say he knew or he didn’t know.
In any event, as Bream points out, the whole thing is just smoke and no fire.
And as Ed Morrissey wrote a few minutes ago at Hot Air, the memos aren’t even what Booker claimed they were:
So what was the memo? It’s already been released and posted on Scribd, so it’s not confidential any longer. It’s a discussion among Bush administration officials, Kavanaugh included, in early 2002 about racial profiling, in part related to airport security. In fact, Kavanaugh wanted race-neutral security measures put in place, but acknowledged that an interim screening process might need to focus specifically on potential al-Qaeda members:
Another memo from August 2001 was on an entirely unrelated issue — compliance with the Supreme Court decision in Adarand, which stated that any race-based policies had to withstand “strict scrutiny.” Replying to another analysis of Department of Transportation programs, Kavanaugh predicted they would not withstand a challenge under Adarand:
Despite Booker’s suggestion in the hearing, none of this has to do with the kind of “racial profiling” that involves law enforcement and African-Americans. The only other topic raised was the demand to recognize Native Hawaiians as a protected minority for Small Business Administration programs, which Kavanaugh cautioned would run afoul of Rice v Cayetano and the Constitution if done “because of their race/ethnicity alone[.]” Kavanaugh worked on Rice while in private practice, and his side won at the Supreme Court in 2000, just a couple of years prior to this exchange.
None of these seem terribly problematic, although all three clearly qualify for executive privilege exceptions — internal discussions for policy questions. The first example might prove the trickiest to explain seventeen years after the 9/11 attacks, but with the anniversary coming up on Tuesday, perhaps not even so much so. That discussion took place just four months after 3,000 Americans got murdered by AQ terrorists, and many people wanted security tailored specifically to find other AQ and affiliated terrorists.
In other words, this was a case of manufactured outrage, one which demonstrates precisely why discussions under executive privilege are usually kept confidential. The result of Booker’s grandstanding will undoubtedly be, as Mike Lee warned in the hearing, that the Senate Judiciary Committee will get a lot fewer documents in the future and presidents will make much broader executive privilege claims to make sure of it.
Manufactured outrage. This is what Democrats like Booker are good at, especially when they are running for president. And sadly, the outrage gets more press than the actual facts do when the smoke clears. So he had his moment and his fans will love it. But anyone being objective will see that he’s just a desperate fraud.