(Headline USA) Senate Republicans are accusing the White House of deliberately withholding information regarding a child pornography case Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson ruled on.
The case in question was U.S. v. Cane, which involved “over 6,500 files depicting children appearing to be of elementary, middle, and high school ages, engaged in sexual acts or posing sexually.”
The probation office recommended the court give the offender 84 months in prison, but Jackson sentenced him to only 60 months, which was the mandatory minimum.
“Not only does this case, which Judge Jackson left off her list of child abuse cases, undercut her argument that she followed the probation office’s recommended sentences, but it also underscores the perils of moving too quickly in the vetting process,” a Republican Judiciary Committee aide said, according to Fox News.
The White House argued that it intentionally left the Cane case out of the materials it gave senators because it happened so close to the end of Jackson’s tenure on the D.C. District Court. It also defended her sentencing in the case, claiming Jackson’s sentence was “consistent with or above what the government or the U.S. Probation Office recommended.”
During her confirmation hearings, Republican senators grilled Jackson on her leniency toward sex offenders, pointing out that in a large number of cases involving child pornography, she refused to follow prosecutor recommendations and instead gave offenders shorter prison sentences.
Republicans have also argued that Senate Democrats have withheld information about Jackson. Sen. Dick Durbin, R-Ill., specifically, refused to make public to the committee a number of records related to her child pornography decisions, they said.
“I’ve asked for non-public records related to the judge’s tenure on the [U.S.] Sentencing Commission,” Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, explained last week. “Those have not been produced, just like 48,000 pages of records withheld by the White House.
“How is the United States Senate supposed to review a record that we don’t have?” he said. “This process might be timely, but it’s neither thorough nor fair to the American public, and I hope we can rectify that.”
