White House slams GOP document search on Sotomayor

WASHINGTON — The White House hit back Thursday at a key Republican senator who has accused Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor’s allies of withholding documents from her past.

White House Counsel Greg Craig told Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the top Republican on the Judiciary Committee, that board meeting minutes and other papers detailing the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund’s activities while Sotomayor was an outside adviser aren’t relevant to her nomination. Republicans have raised concerns about the judge’s involvement in the group, arguing it has taken extreme positions.

Sotomayor early last month gave the panel documents she contributed to or helped write as a board member, but Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., the Judiciary chairman, joined Sessions recently in asking for more information about the group’s activities and policy positions while she was involved.

The organization, now know as LatinoJustice PRLDEF, began sending some of that material to the committee Wednesday, but Sessions’ office said Sotomayor’s backers were delaying the release of the information to prevent a thorough investigation.

Cesar Perales, PRLDEF’s president and general counsel, told the AP earlier this week that he planned to send the documents on a rolling basis, and all of them would arrive on Capitol Hill by the end of the week. Hearings on Sotomayor’s nomination are scheduled to begin July 13.

In a letter to Sessions, Craig said the Judiciary panel already has all pertinent documents on Sotomayor. He said the judge never served on PRLDEF’s staff or supervised its employees, and noted that Republicans have in years past refused to release similar documents on their own Supreme Court nominees.

“Perhaps there is confusion about Judge Sotomayor’s role with PRLDEF, and that confusion may account for your unusual interest,” Craig wrote. “Let me be clear: On Judge Sotomayor’s behalf, we submitted all documents the committee requested of her, and we did so in record time.”

Craig also defended PRLDEF, calling it “a highly respected civil rights fund.”

Thursday’s letter constituted the White House’s response to a series of questions Sessions sent Sotomayor last week about the document search at PRLDEF. He wanted to know whether Sotomayor sent her own representatives to comb through the organization’s archives, who they were, whether they copied any information that wasn’t given to the Judiciary Committee, and whether they left the boxes “fully intact.”

Craig said it was his office that sent private lawyers helping with Sotomayor’s nomination to pore through the documents, and they sent all “responsive” documents to the panel.

“No one working for the White House removed any documents from the archives boxes they reviewed,” Craig wrote.

The White House is strongly resisting Republicans’ suggestions that the hearings should be delayed to give them more time to review the group’s documents so they can draw conclusions about Sotomayor.

The best evidence “of how she’d be as a judge are the 17 years of legal opinions that she has written and that she herself has worked on — not a box or boxes of documents that she didn’t write, review or approve,” said Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman. “I think there has been plenty of time to review the record.”