Bill Burck — a private lawyer for former President George W. Bush who has been deciding which Brett Kavanaugh documents from his time in the Bush administration would be turned over to the Senate — got an extended shoutout Tuesday as Judiciary Democrats entered their second hour of holding up Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court hearings due to the lack of transparency during the confirmation process.
“Who is he? Who is paying him?” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) said. He noted that Burck is not a government employee, and sarcastically referenced the constitution Kavanaugh is said to carry in his pocket.
“It doesn’t include Mr. Burck,” Durbin said.
Zing!
And not JUST that: this is EXACTLY where the Dems should have aimed their first volley -at the ubiquitous acting for everyone Bill Burck.
Burck’s list of clients INCLUDES GWB personally, the GW library, the interests of both in the GWB materials housed at NARA, McGahn, Preibus, Bannon and that barely scratches the surface. All avenues of disclosure start and end at Burck, he’s often actually ACTING AS LEGAL COUNSEL at one of the end of the paper trail and acting in the same capacity for someone else at the OTHER end of the same paper trail.
Good for Sen Durbin.
If this were a real hearing, each and every claim of executive privilege would be subject to adjudication. And each claim would be backed up by a real reason. Instead, we have a lawyer who is sorta kinda acting for the ex-president who could (perhaps) assert the privilege and sorta kinda acting for others. And he’s not actually saying he asserts a privilege, he’s saying that the current white house and DoJ (we don’t know how DoJ got into it in the first place) are saying that they would like to assert privilege and he’s “deferring to them” on that. Oh, and the documents are of some unspecified kind that is like documents over which privilege has been asserted in the past (not saying whether successfully or not).
So Burck is essentially doing what trump administration witnesses have done many times already before congress: he’s floating some random theory to which he attaches the word privilege, refusing to produce, and daring the committee to do anything about it. And for some strange reason a republican committee chair whose party benefits from that refusal is not pushing the issue.
Talk about collusion.