On Friday, I reported that in two 1996 documents from the Clinton library, it appeared that Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan had grouped the NRA and the KKK together as “Bad guy orgs.” With administration colleague Fran Allegra, she was discussing a bill that would protect volunteers from tort liability in some cases. In a memo, Allegra told Kagan that he had checked the IRS’s list of tax-exempt charities, and that neither the NRA nor the KKK was on it. The White House responded first via Greg Sargent, my response to which is here.

CNN has a different line of response from the one Sargent reported:

“Kagan’s notes from a conversation with DOJ Attorney Fran Allegra track an earlier memo Allegra sent to her outlining which organizations would be shielded under volunteer and nonprofit liability legislation,” said White House spokesman Ben LaBolt. “Allegra’s memo notes that neither the KKK nor the NRA would be shielded from liability under the bill, after Democrats in Congress and others raised concerns that the provision swept too broadly. It’s simply not credible to suggest that these jotted down notes represent anything but preliminary research on legal questions about what organizations would be covered under the legislation, and the organizations discussed reflect the public debate over the legislation at that time.”

The idea seems to be that Kagan was merely doing her due diligence in investigating claims that Democrats had raised; hey, maybe she even used the term “Bad guy orgs” in their voice.

But that doesn’t seem to be the way Allegra took it. He wrote — “gently advised,” CNN puts it — Kagan in his memo: “We probably need to be careful about suggesting ‘bad’ organizations will qualify for the provision bill as it would suggest we are allowing ‘bad’ organizations to qualify for tax-exempt status.” This certainly suggests that Kagan herself viewed the NRA and the KKK as “‘bad’ organizations,” and that he was cautioning the administration — “we,” not “Democrats in Congress” — to avoid using that as a line of attack.