Kavanaugh once said ruling on Watergate tapes may have been ‘erroneous’

President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh said years ago that the Supreme Court decision that required Richard Nixon to release the Watergate tapes may have been incorrect.

Kavanaugh on Saturday handed over thousands of pages of documents to the Senate Judiciary Committee as part of his confirmation process, including a 1999 magazine article that details the roundtable where Kavanaugh made the remark, The Associated Press reported.

In the materials released on Saturday, the now-nominee said the ruling U.S. v. Nixon may have been wrong.

The landmark decision placed restrictions on a president’s ability to claim executive privilege in order to avoid turning over information necessary to a criminal investigation. The investigation in question ultimately led to Nixon’s resignation.

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“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,” Kavanaugh said during the discussion, which was documented in the January-February 1999 issue of The Washington Lawyer.

“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,” he reportedly said.

He made similar arguments two other times during the roundtable, according to the report.

The documents released Saturday also included Kavanaugh’s revelation that he had been a member of clubs that previously “may have excluded members on discriminatory bases.”

Several Democratic senators have already promised to oppose Kavanaugh’s nomination, which President Trump announced earlier this month.

Republicans are pushing to vote on his confirmation this fall, ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.