the question has been raised whose documents are these. these are the american people s documents. the presidential records act gives us a right to obtain them for a supreme court nomination after the review of the professionals at the national archives. bill burke is not a professional at the national archives. the archives has said this is not their process. equally importantly, because some will now make dire predictions about the appropriateness of the release of any of these documents, bill burke himself in his letter to us of august 31 said, and i quote, presidential records act exemption one, which protects against the disclosure of classified information, did not apply to any documents our team reviewed. i agree with senator booker. this confirmation is too important for us to conceal documents that may reveal the nominee s views. i think we shouldn t be proceeding under these grounds. mr. chairman hold on. may i be recognized? i lop yhope you don t say the
it s classified and it s classified in a way i don t have access to because of a committee assignment i do not have. it s incredibly frustrating. in those circumstances, we look for a demon. there are demons in those circumstances. they are too numerous to name here. there is a demon in this circumstance, but it s a law of our creation. it s called the presidential records act. that s the demon that you are after here. that s the only reason we have got this issue. the custodian of those documents holds and exercises a privilege on behalf of the bush administration. these are documents we would otherwise not have access to. pursuant to an agreement with the senate, the custodian of the records has agreed notwithstanding the privileged nature to hand them over to us with an understanding that when there is a need, that arises with respect to one or more of the documents, to make them public, we can as a committee go
concealing by this procedure? what are they afraid the american people will see, what are they afraid we would be asking of this nm knominee if wd all of those documents that have been denied us in this sham and charade? senator lee? then senator tillis. to senator booker s point, the document has been approved through the committee process. it has been made public. i pledge to work with every one of you. if you have a document as to which a privilege has been asserted such that it s not public yet, i will work with you to try to make it public. let s do it. i think we can do this. it s not that difficult. we have done it several times. at least three times now. we can do it more. the privilege thing is real. this is not our privilege we re dealing with. this is the privilege that belongs to somebody else. the privileged nature of documents has been around for a long time. since the early days of the
designation of documents as committee confidential. i offered to work with the chair. he refused. judiciary democrats sent the chairman a letter on august 28th, restating the objection to the chair s designation of the documents as committee confidential and requesting public release. as i have looked a eed at the documents that are committee confidential, they do not affect any of the usual standards that would deny committee confidentiality. mr. chairman, i think that s a problem. i think we re entitled to all records. and i think the public is entitled to all records. that are appropriate and do not put forward personal information or information that otherwise should not be disclosed.
confidential in any way, shape or form. thank you. mr. chairman, i know you have mentioned a number of times that i went through the process. i do want to point out, however, that i also was on numerous letters asking for all these documents to be released and that my colleagues have repeatedly asked for documents to be released. i go back to what happened on the first morning of this hearing. and that is that we pointed out that when there are 42,000 documents that are dumped on us on one night, there is absolutely no way people are going to be able to adequately review them and as they review them, they re going to find documents that they want to be made public, that they want to ask the nominee about. so the whole point of this is because this hearing was ramrodded through and we weren t given the month it would take to look at these documents where we are where we are. my remedy for this in addition