Brett Kavanaugh is the most "self-serving" pick President Donald Trump could have made to protect himself from a criminal investigation and the confirmation process should not move forward in light of special counsel Robert Mueller's probe, Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J., said on MSNBC on Monday night.
"I'm a little stunned at how this all played out," Booker told host Rachel Maddow after Trump made his announcement.
"He picked the one guy who has specifically written that the president should not be the subject of a criminal investigation, which he is now."
Kavanaugh in 1998 questioned the wisdom of criminal investigations of presidents while they are in office. In 2009, he concluded sitting presidents should not be distracted by civil suits or criminal proceedings.
"Whether the Constitution allows indictment of a sitting president is debatable," Kavanaugh, a D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals judge, wrote in a 1998 law review article.
"A president who is concerned about an ongoing criminal investigation," he wrote in 2009, "is almost inevitably going to do a worse job as president."
Booker later took to Twitter to slam Trump's decision to nominate Kavanaugh.
"We can't underscore enough the fact that @realDonaldTrump is a subject of an ongoing criminal investigation & there's a clear conflict of interest for this president — who has a history of demanding loyalty tests — to name a justice to the court that could be involved," Booker said.
"The Supreme Court could eventually end up issuing a decision on whether a sitting president can pardon himself or be criminally indicted — President Trump should not be able to nominate a justice to that court while his own investigation is ongoing."
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