WASHINGTON -- Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts Jr. provided "opposition research" for the Bush-Quayle-election campaign in 1988, according to an application form that Roberts completed when he sought appointment as deputy solicitor general in the first Bush administration the next year.

	John G. Roberts Jr.

The form was one of several Roberts-related documents from the first Bush administration released yesterday by the George Bush Presidential Library in College Station, Texas, and the National Archives.

The collection also included materials related to former President George H.W. Bush's decision in 1992 to nominate Roberts to succeed newly confirmed Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. That nomination died in the Senate, but Roberts was nominated to the same appeals court by the current President Bush and was confirmed by the Senate two years ago.

A memo from the file of Lee Liberman, who as an associate White House counsel advised the administration on judicial nominations, describes Roberts as a "superstar non-Hispanic candidate" for the D.C. Circuit. The memo said Bush shouldn't feel obliged to appoint a Hispanic to the D.C. Circuit because "from a political perspective, although a nominee for the D.C. Circuit would get the attention of the national Hispanic organizations, nominees to the 5th and 11th circuits would get much more attention from the populations of the states in those circuits, most notably Texas and Florida."

The memo also pointed out how important the D.C. Circuit was to issues involving presidential authority, and said Roberts "would handle these issues superbly."

Yesterday, Lee Liberman Otis told the Post-Gazette that the memo sounded like something she would have written.

The files released yesterday contain two versions of Roberts' application form for the deputy solicitor general's post, both apparently completed on Sept. 22, 1989 -- one handwritten and the other typewritten and processed by the Justice Department.

Both forms asked the applicant to indicate any involvement in the 1988 Bush-Quayle campaign. On the handwritten form, Roberts answered: "Lawyers for Bush/Quayle (D.C.), Exec. Comm., Opposition Research." On the typewritten form that came through the Justice Department, the same answer cites "legal opposition research," suggesting that Roberts looked into legal positions taken by Democratic presidential nominee Michael Dukakis.

Roberts disclosed his 1988 role as a member of the Executive Committee of D.C. Lawyers for Bush/Quayle in a questionnaire he completed for the Senate Judiciary Committee several weeks ago. But in his answer to a question about "services rendered ... to any political party or election committee," he did not specify "opposition research."

The official responsible for the Justice Department when Roberts was considered for the deputy solicitor general post scoffed at any suggestion that Roberts' role in the 1988 campaign was crucial to his advancement to the position of the U.S. government's No. 2 litigator. Murray Dickman, an aide to then-Attorney General Dick Thornburgh, the former Pennsylvania governor, told the Post-Gazette yesterday that the paperwork for Roberts' appointment was "pro forma."

"I specifically remember [then-Solicitor General] Ken Starr told me early he wanted John, and lots of folks -- like [Justice Department official] Michael Luttig -- spoke well of him," Dickman said. "So while I [technically] had a veto before it went to White House personnel, it wasn't an issue, since John was well known to [White House Counsel] Boyden Gray's office.

"There's less here than meets the eye," Dickman added. "Ninety percent of the D.C. lawyers who ended up in the administration always said they belonged to Lawyers for Bush-Quayle, which was a committee on paper. Until the 2000 recount in Florida, such committees were never asked to do anything."

Yesterday, Roberts met for a second time with Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. Leahy said he asked Roberts to review a controversial 2002 Bush administration memo about interrogating suspected terrorists that narrowly defined "torture." The memo, written by then-Justice Department official Jay S. Bybee (now a federal judge), was retracted by the administration two years later, and officials emphasized that they did not engage in or condone torture of suspects.

But the memo became a flashpoint in the January confirmation hearings for Attorney General Alberto Gonzales because some Democrats charged that it led to mistreatment of detainees at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

Leahy said he expected senators to question Roberts about the memo during his confirmation hearings next week because they will want his view of whether "a president [can] be considered to be above the law."