As the nominations chief for the Senate Judiciary Committee, Jensen, a graduate of Brigham Young University and the University of Utah law school, is an insider in the push to fill the first Supreme Court vacancy in 11 years.
Jensen's task is to distill the volumes of information on the nominee, including the highly sensitive FBI background check, and help Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter chart a strategy to get Roberts onto the bench.
“He's really as good as it gets and he's handled one of the most sensitive jobs on Capitol Hill,” said Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, former Judiciary chairman. “It takes somebody of tremendous reliability and decency to handle that.”
In the coming weeks, Jensen will be reading, re-reading, digesting and breaking down every opinion, law article, and legal brief Roberts has ever written and every speech he has ever delivered.
The 30-year-old, with a shaven head, horn-rimmed glasses and a wide grin is one of a select few with Top Secret clearance enabling them to review the sensitive, raw information in the FBI background check, which contains interviews of the nominees' friends and enemies, neighbors and colleagues.
Typically, both Democrats and Republicans have considered the files sacrosanct, and there is an appreciation that any leak could subvert the confirmation process.
“There's going to be so much pressure. It's not even the intentional leak you worry about, but the inadvertent” slip, said Jensen in an interview this week. “You just look at how much money is going to be spent on this . . . the lengths people will go to to get dirt on [the nominee.]”
Hatch says it was a leak from the FBI interview of Anita Hill that threw the confirmation of Clarence Thomas into turmoil in 1991 and, as a result, “We went through one of the most horrific times in Supreme Court nominee history.”
Security is being ratcheted up to make sure the committee stays airtight. Placards on the doors identifying committee offices have been removed and electronic keypad-activated locks are being installed.
“We're doing everything we can to make sure we don't have any problems,” Jensen said.
Bush has said he wants to see Roberts confirmed to the bench when the court reconvenes Oct. 3, which sets a tight schedule in light of recent nominees and Congress' usual August recess. But Jensen said there is no reason to expect the confirmation to drag on.
“We want a fair process and we want a thorough process, but we also want to make sure we're not unfair to the nominee,” he said.
In the weeks following Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's resignation, committee staff members were sent scurrying to educate themselves on confirmation history. None of
them have been through a Supreme Court confirmation before, and only three of the committee's Republican senators have such experience.
That left them poring over transcripts of past hearings and articles and books written on the high court process.
On Tuesday night, when Bush announced Roberts as the pick, Jensen worked late into the night, preparing talking points for Specter and updating what information the committee had on the judge.
“I didn't get much sleep” that night, he said. “I got home at 1:30 [a.m.] and still had things going through my mind.”
The last time there was an opening on the high court, Jensen was a Mormon missionary among a Vietnamese community of about 20,000 living in Philadelphia. “Literally, I thought it was a misprint when I got the call,” he said.
After returning home to Beaverton, Ore., he worked three jobs to earn money to spend the next several months in Vietnam, putting around the country on a Russian motorcycle given to him by a friend. When the money ran out, he got a job for three months teaching English in Saigon.
He enrolled at Brigham Young University and then law school at the University of Utah. After his second year, he was offered a clerkship with the Judiciary Committee, where his job included digging into the backgrounds of witnesses Democrats presented in opposition to President Bush's judges - “fighting fire with fire,” as he puts it.
During one hearing in late 2003, after noted Northwestern University legal ethicist Steve Lubet had criticized the conduct of a nominee, Hatch, armed with Jensen's research, tore into Lubet. Hatch showed a poster of a shaggy-haired Lubet more than three decades ago, standing atop a car with a megaphone leading a protest with the leftist group, Students for a Democratic Society. He used the image to challenge Lubet's judgment of others' ethics.
“That was my moment of glory,” Jensen says, grinning. “I've still got the poster.”
He returned to the committee after finishing law school and was one of a few staffers kept on by Specter when he took over as chairman from Hatch earlier this year.
Jensen and his wife, Angela have three children: Eliza, 4; Shea, 2; and Jonah, 18 months..
She is the daughter of Bud Scruggs, who was Gov. Norm Bangerter's chief of staff and a political science professor at BYU. Jensen's low profile is seen as an asset by some observers.
“Pete is smart, he's hard working and he has a fairly reserved personality. He's not one of those Hill staffers who is out to make sure everyone knows he's the main guy,” said Alex Dahl, former deputy staff director for the Judiciary Committee, now with the U.S. Attorney's Office in Washington.
