Legal News - Kavanaugh: Watergate tapes decision may have been wrong

Legal News Journal

Legal News Home page Click here to add this website to your favorites
  rss
Bar News Search >>>

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh suggested several years ago that the unanimous high court ruling in 1974 that forced President Richard Nixon to turn over the Watergate tapes, leading to the end of his presidency, may have been wrongly decided.

Kavanaugh was taking part in a roundtable discussion with other lawyers when he said at three different points that the decision in U.S. v. Nixon, which marked limits on a president's ability to withhold information needed for a criminal prosecution, may have come out the wrong way.

A 1999 magazine article about the roundtable was part of thousands of pages of documents that Kavanaugh has provided to the Senate Judiciary Committee as part of the confirmation process. The committee released the documents on Saturday.

Kavanaugh's belief in robust executive authority already is front and center in his nomination by President Donald Trump to replace the retiring Justice Anthony Kennedy. The issue could assume even greater importance if special counsel Robert Mueller seeks to force Trump to testify in the ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

"But maybe Nixon was wrongly decided — heresy though it is to say so. Nixon took away the power of the president to control information in the executive branch by holding that the courts had power and jurisdiction to order the president to disclose information in response to a subpoena sought by a subordinate executive branch official. That was a huge step with implications to this day that most people do not appreciate sufficiently...Maybe the tension of the time led to an erroneous decision," Kavanaugh said in a transcript of the discussion that was published in the January-February 1999 issue of the Washington Lawyer.


Breaking Legal News  |  Headline News  |  Law Center  |  Legal Business  |  Court News  |  Law Firm News  |  Legal Interviews |  Political and Legal
Practice Focuses  |  Legal Spotlight  |  Events & Seminars  |  Legal Marketing  |  Court Watch  |  Immigration  |  Press Releases
International  |  Politics  |  Justice Stories  |  Web Design for Law Firms  |  Celebrity Courthouse
Lawyer Website Design For Sole Practitioners
© The Legal News Journal. All rights reserved.