A Democrat Minister on the question of whether Cory Booker faces an investigation into ethics for publishing Kavanaugh's confidential documents

A senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sunday refused to rule out the possibility that Senator Cory Booker, DN.J., faces an ethics committee investigation for leaking confidential documents during confirmation hearings. last week for Brett Kavanaugh.

Speaking exclusively on "Fox News Sunday," Sen. Chris Coons, D-Del., Who also sits on the Senate Ethics Committee, repeatedly refused to confirm or deny the existence of an official investigation into the actions of Booker.

"I have to be careful about what I'm saying here because I'm the vice-chair of the ethics committee, and in that role, I can not say anything about what can or can not be presented to the committee" said Coons. He added, "I really can not say if this goes against the rules of the committee."

When Wallace asked if Booker was facing an investigation of ethics, Coons remained mom.

"I can not say anything about it," said the Delaware senator. "Ethics Committee rules prohibit any member of the committee from commenting on whether or not a matter is before the committee." Coons then confirmed that it meant that he could not deny the existence of a probe.

In a dramatic moment on Thursday morning, Booker announced that he would publish a series of Bush-era documents, including Kavanaugh's reflections on racial profiling following the September 11 terrorist attacks and his assessment of Views of the Supreme Court on Roe v. Wade.

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The documents appeared to be qualified as a "confidential committee", which meant that they could only be seen by the Senate Judiciary Committee and not by the public.

"It's pretty much the closest to my life to a" I'm Spartacus, "Booker said, making sure to point out that he was likely to be kicked out of the Senate for what he said. He claims to be serious violations of the rules, and senators can only be expelled by an extraordinary vote of two-thirds of their colleagues, which has not been the case since the civil war.

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A spokesman for the Judiciary Committee told Fox News late Thursday that at least some of the emails that Booker had posted were still "confidential" when he published them a few hours earlier, suggesting that Booker had violated the rules of the Senate. that they had released a large number of documents for public distribution the night before Booker published them on Twitter.

One of the documents was a 2003 e-mail that was marked "Confidential Committee" in which Kavanaugh wrote: "I am not sure that all jurists consider Roe as the law established at the Supreme Court level, because its precedent, and three current judges of the Court would do so. "

Kavanaugh, then a lawyer in the George W. Bush administration, was invited to comment on a draft opinion letter to pro-life women. He has repeatedly told the Democrats that email only reflected his opinion of the "jurists" and did not necessarily reflect his own views.

The Democrats also highlighted a 2001 email referenced Wednesday in which Kavanaugh seemed scornful of Ministry of Transport regulations that favored minority-owned companies, even if they did not offer the most competitive offers on a particular contract .

"The fundamental problem in this case is that these DOT regulations use a lot of legalism and disguises to mask what is really a naked racial throwing," wrote Kavanaugh as part of his analysis that Conservative members of the Supreme Court Kavanaugh on Thursday defended e-mail as an assessment of his views on the Supreme Court's likely decision-making on the issue.

And in 2002, Kavanaugh wrote that he generally "favored" "long-term" racially neutral security measures. But he acknowledged that government officials should "tackle" the viability of a potential interim solution that includes race in mind, suggesting that until the adoption of neutral policies, national security issues the September 11 attacks may require another approach.

Coons told Wallace that he remained "gravely concerned by the fact that [Kavanaugh] It's not in the judicial stream on several really important precedents that would have a real impact on the rights and freedoms of individual Americans and on the presidential power. "

But the top Democrat was in agreement with the Trump administration on one point: the anonymous author of a New York Times editorial describing efforts to undermine his presidency of the New York Times. interior should leave the White House.

"I agree with this position, and I think the honorable thing to do is to resign and make public the author's concerns about the president's ability to serve," said Coons.