Patrick Leahy

I am concerned because there is evidence that Mr. Miranda provided you with materials that were stolen from me.

I want Judge Kavanaugh to have access so that we can ask him these questions under oath and he can see them.

But when I have opposed one, like with Judge Owen, when I was raising some varied questions about funding that she was getting from people that were before her court, that might have raised a red flag that I had some concerns about her.

Well, as you know--you know, it is a fact I voted for a lot of Republican nominees.

Did my staff ever send you confidential material from Senator Hatch that was stolen from his emails?

Did you know that you were getting, from Mr. Miranda, stolen emails?

Two days before the hearing, he told you that the Democrats were passing around a related '60 Minutes' story.

In a way, it was considered by many, both Republicans and Democrats, as a digital Watergate.

These Republican staffers stole 4,670 files, and they used them to assist in getting President Bush's most controversial judicial nominees confirmed.

The Supreme Court is a guarantor of our liberties and our republic. Few, I would argue, are worthy of taking a seat.

This is the most incomplete, most partisan, least transparent vetting for any Supreme Court nominee I have ever seen.

Today, with this hearing, it is not being the conscience of the Nation.

I represented Vermont here for 44 years. I served with pride here, believing that the Senate can be and should be the conscience of the Nation.

Such a move is simply incompatible with transparency.

In critical ways, our Committee is abandoning its tradition of exhaustively vetting Supreme Court nominees.

You should be sitting in front of us only after we have completed a review of your record.

This is for now we have a President who has declared in the last 24 hours that the Department of Justice should not prosecute Republicans.

It seems that you may have intrigued him for another reason, your expansive view of Executive power and Executive immunity.

President Trump promised he would only nominate judges to the Supreme Court who would overturn Roe v. Wade, judges who would dismantle the Affordable Care Act, judges who would reshape our judiciary.

We had 99 percent of her records from the White House that were made public 12 days--12 days--before the hearing.

We know how many--we know what you have done in a lower court. That is the best basis for knowing whether or not you ought to be on the Supreme Court.

But a check after the hearing is over is no check. I think we ought to at least have the National Archives finish it.

Mr. Chairman, if I might add to this, on the integrity of the documents we have received, there really is no integrity. They have alterations. They have oddities.

Senator Stevens believed that the Appropriations Committee was a place where good ideas rather than political party should carry the day.

It's a hallmark we are working to restore now.