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Today, Roll Call detailed how Goodwin Liu, the Berkeley Law professor and Obama nominee to the 9^th Circuit Court, withheld prior statements from the Senate Judiciary Committee:

Liu failed to disclose “an extraordinary” 117 items from his record… a commencement speech to the University of California-Berkeley law school, text from a panel discussion on the 2008 election and the Supreme Court, his participation in presentations on affirmative action and the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, as well as a conference on school funding.

What was Liu’s excuse for not including these items?

Liu said [he] “did not think to include various occasions when I spoke at informal seminars, brown bag lunches, or student or alumni gatherings on campus or elsewhere …”

Is Liu really trying to compare leaving out a commencement speech to remarks at brown bag lunches? Withholding records from the Senate Judiciary Committee is not a minor oversight. Knowing full well that he is beyond controversial, it seems that Liu has tried to ease his path to nomination by concealing documents that could add fire to the growing flames.

And this isn’t the first time an Obama nominee withheld vital information from the Senate Judiciary Committee. Attorney General Eric Holder failed to submit several Supreme Court amicus briefs during his Senate confirmation hearing last year. And the White House failed to properly and promptly turn over hundreds of boxes pertaining to Sonia Sotomayor and her leadership of the Puerto Rican Legal Defense Fund. If this pattern of deceit continues with Obama’s nominees, how will we be able to trust a possible nominee to the highest court in the land?

This revelation comes on the heels of an extraordinary letter written by 42 California District Attorneys condemning Liu as exactly the type of judge California, and the nation, does not need:

For many years, our ability to enforce the law and protect the citizens of our jurisdictions has been hampered by erroneous decisions of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. This court has been far out of the judicial mainstream, as indicated by its frequent and often summary reversal by the Supreme Court, at a rate far above the national average… Professor Liu’s… views on criminal law, capital punishment, and the role of the federal courts in second-guessing state decisions are fully aligned with the judges who have made the Ninth Circuit the extreme outlier that it presently is. We urge the Judiciary Committee and the full Senate to reject this nomination.