Washington, D.C.—Yesterday, Sept. 12, People for the American Way (PFAW) filed a complaint with the D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility against Brett Kavanaugh for professional misconduct. The complaint accuses Kavanaugh of violating Rule8.4(c) of the Rules of Professional Conduct by providing false and misleading testimony under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee. The rule makes it clear that attorneys who “[e]ngage in conduct involving dishonesty, fraud, deceit, or misrepresentation” have committed professional misconduct.
“Brett Kavanaugh’s dishonesty before the Senate Judiciary Committee clearly constitutes professional misconduct,” PFAW Senior Legislative Counsel Paul Gordon said. “The newly released emails from his time at the White House clearly show that his recent testimony before the committee, along with his 2004 and 2006 testimonies, contained major misrepresentations. The D.C. Board on Professional Responsibility should investigate immediately, and his nomination process should be halted until that investigation is complete.”
PFAW compared the email records made public during Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings with prior testimony given to the committee and found several false statements.
Emails from 2002 show that Kavanaugh committed misrepresentations in 2004, 2006, and 2018, when he said that not only had he not received information stolen by Republican Manuel Miranda from the Judiciary Committee in 2003, but that he had never even seen material referring to the stolen documents. Emails released during his current confirmation process show that this is simply not true.
Kavanaugh also claimed in 2006 that he had heard “nothing at all” about the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program until he read about it in The New York Times. His email records from his time at the White House show this to be false.
The complaint notes that Kavanaugh’s misleading statements strengthen the stereotype of members of the legal profession as being untrustworthy “to the disrepute of attorneys and the D.C. Bar.”
People For the American Way is a progressive advocacy organization founded to fight right-wing extremism and defend constitutional values including free expression, religious liberty, equal justice under the law, and the right to meaningfully participate in our democracy. Learn more: https://www.pfaw.org.
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