When Lisa Graves was working at the U.S. Senate, she encountered Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, and she has the documents to prove it.
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow read through Graves detailed story in Slate, revealing that when Kavanaugh was asked by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) to answer whether he lied under oath, he knowingly lied about it again.
The emails Kavanaugh exchanged before his appointment to the court of appeals had not yet been released, but they are now. Some emails warned Kavanaugh not to distribute talking points from the Democrats on the committee.
"If these were documents shared from the Democratic side of the aisle as part of normal business, as Kavanaugh claimed to have believed in his most recent testimony, why would they be labeled 'not [for] distribution?'" Graves wrote. "And why would we share our precise strategy to fight controversial Republican nominations with the Republicans we were fighting?"
She went so far as to say that one email included the subject line "spying," which she called a pretty definitive clue.
"Even if Kavanaugh could claim that he didn’t have any hint at the time he received the emails that these documents were of suspect provenance—which I personally find implausible—there is no reasonable way for him to assert honestly that he had no idea what they were after the revelation of the theft," Graves continued. "Any reasonable person would have realized they had been stolen, and certainly, someone as smart as Kavanaugh would have too."
Instead, he lied, and he's about to become a Supreme Court Justice. Graves told Maddow she was pleased to see so many people learning the facts now, as the hearings were rushed forward.
"And so many documents have not been seen. In fact, 100,000 pages or more have not been seen," she warned. "But from the documents that have been provided, including documents that came out just last week, it's clear that Manuel Miranda provided documents, talking points, materials that were taken from, stolen from democratic staff, and he gave them to him during this incredibly intense fight over [George W.] Bush's judicial nominees."
She went on to say that the memos were some she personally did research for.
"And so one of the memos I know personally contains page after page, paragraph after paragraph of my research, the research I prepared for Sen. Patrick Leahy, research on the most intense fight we were having about the nomination which involved the legal precedents, the historical precedents for the memos that the Senate Democrats have requested," Graves continued.
She said that Miranda then handed everything over to Kavanaugh.
"And so I am convinced by that and some of the other documents provided that Brett Kavanaugh lied repeatedly under oath to the United States Senate about these matters," she said. "Also for the integrity of the United States Senate itself."
Watch the full interview below:
