SENATOR CHUCK GRASSLEY COMMENTS (AFTER RECESS):

…. It seems odd to me that we don’t have criticism of people that are saying the same thing about the Supreme Court, so I want to read whenever the President criticizes a judiciary or judicial decisions, we hear wales of anguish from my Demo colleagues. They attack the President for threatening the independence and the integrity of the judiciary and they applaud the judiciary for standing up to the President. I just listened to some of my colleagues here. One of them spent 18 minutes attacking the personal integrity of Justices of the Supreme Court. He said that five Justices have been bought and sold by private interests. He accused them of deciding cases to the benefit of favored parties, so I think it’s pretty clear, a double standard and we shouldn’t have to tolerate such double standard.

And, particularly from a press that is the policemen of our whole democratic process; that without a free press our government would be less than what it is. And, It seems to me that’s something that I hope somebody will take into consideration, but probably won’t. Then also, several Senators have brought up about 6% and the 99% and things like that that I thought I ought to clear up because I can say myself that when I first found out how many paper Judge Kavanaugh had on his record, I mean for his background, I started talking about a hundred, a million pages, and then when we finally get 488,000 I can say well I got about 48% of what we ought to have, but there’s a good explanation why we don’t have it. So, I want to read, some of my colleagues keep saying that we have only 6% of Judge Kavanaugh’s White House records, but that 99% of Justice Kagan’s (sp?) White House records were made public before the hearing. This is fuzzy math; my colleagues calibrate their phony 6% figure on two inaccurate numbers. First their 6% figure counts, the estimated page count by a career archivist at the National Archives, based upon their historical practice, before the on process emails and attachments are actually reviewed. When Judge Kavanaugh’s White House emails that we’ve received the actual number of pages ended up being significantly less than the number the National Archives estimated before the actual review. One reason is that we were able to use technology about the exact duplicate emails. Instead of having 13 times an email that Judge Kavanaugh sent to 12 White House colleagues, we only had to read the email once. Second, the 6% figure counts millions and millions of pages of irrelevant staff secretary documents that we never requested or needed. More importantly, we received 100% of the documents we requested from Kavanaugh’s time as an Executive Branch lawyer. And while we may have received 99% of Justice Kagan’s White House records, we received zero records from her most relevant legal service as a Solicitor General, the Federal government’s top Supreme Court advocate. We received much less than 99% of her records as a lawyer and we didn’t receive 60,000 emails from Justice Kagan, so 99% is an overestimate; and, even though we never received them, Justice Kagan ‘s Solicitor General records were much more needed at the time because Kagan was a blank slate as a judge. Instead, unlike Judge Kavanaugh with his 12 years of judicial service and over 10,000 pages of judicial writings on the nation’s most important federal circuit court, Justice Kagan had zero years of judicial service and zero pages of judicial writing before her appointment to the highest court.