Records affirm Kagan's role in crafting Clinton's policies

WASHINGTON - For four years as a White House lawyer and aide, Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan had a hand in many of the major issues that drove and vexed the Clinton administration.

Nearly 90,000 pages of records from the Clinton White House, released at the request of senators who will vote on her nomination, show that Kagan played a role in crafting Clinton's policies on abortion, gun control, welfare reform and tobacco.

They also reveal that she was among the small army of lawyers who worked unsuccessfully to postpone Paula Jones' sexual harassment lawsuit against President Bill Clinton. His testimony for the suit, denying a sexual relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, helped lead to his impeachment.

The William J. Clinton Presidential Library in Little Rock, Ark., has not released about 11,000 pages of Kagan's e-mails.

Republicans renewed complaints that the documents are emerging too slowly for her confirmation hearing, scheduled to begin June 28.

Many documents reinforce the idea that Kagan, 50, tried to fashion compromises across a range of issues, faced with the difficult political reality of a Democratic White House and Republican Congress.

Her work on tobacco legislation sought to bridge differences between public health advocates and cigarette makers as well as attract a bipartisan majority in Congress.

In 1996, Kagan worked on a politically tricky election-year issue, trying to come up with the response to the GOP-led ban on an abortion procedure that opponents call partial-birth abortion.

Clinton vetoed the bill because it lacked an exception for cases where it was needed to avert "serious adverse health consequences" for the mother - language that Kagan helped draft.

Some material is being shared only with the committee, including many Kagan's memos and notes about the Jones suit. The library said that publicly releasing those documents would divulge confidential advice.

That suit, involving allegations from Clinton's time as governor of Arkansas, was brought by Jones, a former state employee. Clinton wanted to postpone the suit until he left office. The Supreme Court eventually ruled against him.