Trump Supreme Court Nominee's College Newspaper: Don't Use College Writings Against Public Figures

It seems Neil Gorsuch, President Donald Trump ’s nominee to the Supreme Court, knew reporters would someday be rifling through Columbia University’s library.

Waiting in the yellowing copies of The Federalist Paper, a conservative publication that Gorsuch co-founded and edited while a student at Columbia, is a prebuttal of sorts: Don’t take my college work too seriously.

“Minor indiscretions by public officials in their youth were once dismissed as normal, understandable, even forgivable,” an unsigned Fed editorial said in November 1987, when Gorsuch was the paper’s top editor.

Fed editorials, the paper said, “are passed by a majority of the Editors” with dissenting editors occasionally identified by name. (The November 1987 editorial mentions no dissenters.)

“The stark realization that one’s moves and words today ‘can and will be held against’ one forty or fifty years hence can only inspire unproductive anxiety in students who aspire to such positions,” the paper’s editors wrote.

“College students ought to be held responsible for their actions to a certain degree,” they continued. “Yet, in examining details of any individual’s decision, a more reasonable and understanding line ought to be drawn between relevant and irrelevant information.”