The lawyer advising former President George W. Bush on the release of thousands of records relating to Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh’s time as an aide in the Bush White House once worked for him — a relationship that opponents of the judge’s nomination to the Supreme Court say is a conflict of interest.
The lawyer, William A. Burck, served as a deputy to Judge Kavanaugh in 2005 when he was staff secretary — a job at the center of a bitter documents dispute between Democrats and Republicans.
A team of roughly 50 lawyers is reviewing tens of thousands of pages of documents held by the Bush Library in Texas as part of an effort to determine which, if any, should be withheld from the Senate based on Mr. Bush’s assertion of “executive privilege” — his right to object to their release.
The documents relate to Judge Kavanaugh’s time in the Bush White House Counsel’s Office, not his time as staff secretary. Mr. Burck is not screening the documents himself, but he is supervising the review, and, according to a person familiar with the process, does advise the former president as he makes those decisions.