Ryan Wesley Bounds testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee during his confirmation hearing to be U.S. circuit judge for the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals on May 9, 2018. (Photo: Diego M. Radzinschi/ALM)

During his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Ryan Bounds, the Oregon assistant U.S. attorney President Donald Trump nominated to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, expressed regret for the “overheated” and “overbroad” rhetoric he used in opinion pieces he wrote while in college.

But at Wednesday morning's hearing, Bounds pushed back against the contention by Oregon's two Democratic U.S. senators—Ron Wyden and Jeff Merkley—that he intentionally withheld his undergraduate writings from the bipartisan committee they formed to vet nominees.

In February, the Oregon senators' vetting committee ranked Bounds among the top four candidates for the Ninth Circuit seat left vacant when Judge Diarmuid O'Scannlain took senior status at the end of 2016. But around the same time, a liberal advocacy group surfaced opinion pieces Bounds wrote for a Stanford University newspaper where he criticized “race-focused” student groups and decried people who “fancy themselves oppressed.”