Senator Patrick Leahy, the ranking Democratic member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, yesterday sent a letter to the President on behalf of all of his Democratic colleagues on the Committee, pointing out that the White House hasn’t responded to “numerous” requests for documents related to Judge Roberts’s record, and that it has released some documents to the press but not to the Senate:
We understand that the process of reviewing the approximately 50,000 pages of relevant papers housed in the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, California, is well underway. Published reports state that the head of the Library has estimated that such a review would take three weeks, and the National Archive’s website estimates the documents will be made public by mid-August. Nonetheless, on August 5, 2005, it was reported in the Washington Post that the White House already has possession of some of those “Reagan-era” documents, and that someone in the White House had provided at least two of them to the newspaper . . . We are especially concerned that upon reviewing these documents someone in the White House provided them to the press but not to the Committee; if there are any other such documents we should receive them immediately.
You can read the full letter here. We certainly hope that the White House will take Senator Leahy’s concerns seriously and will release these documents to the Senate and to the public.
