Kavanaugh’s many lies about small questions mean he’s probably lying about the big questionI think Brett Kavanaugh is probably lying about having sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford, and many other things, and has decided from the beginning to say what he has to in order to fulfill his career ambition. There is, however, at least some, small chance that he is telling the truth when he professes his innocence. And that small chance gives me some sympathetic human reaction to his emotional testimonial. If he is somehow innocent, as he claims, he has been subject to a horrifying and humiliating ordeal.
That, however, does not justify confirming Kavanaugh to a lifelong position on the Supreme Court. He has, for one thing, all but abandoned the posture of impartiality demanded of a judge. A ranting Kavanaugh launched angry, evidence-free charges against Senate Democrats. “The behavior of several of the Democratic members of this committee at my hearing a few weeks ago was an embarrassment. But at least it was just a good old-fashioned attempt at Borking,” he said, using a partisan term invented by Republicans to complain about ideological scrutiny of an extreme judicial nominee. “This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled by pent-up anger over President Trump in the 2016 election.”
Why they took this revenge against Kavanaugh, rather than the first justice who was appointed after the 2016 elections, when Democrats’ anger over both the election and the treatment of Merrick Garland ran hotter, he did not say. Kavanaugh does not seem able to imagine even the possibility that Democrats actually believe the women accusing him of sexual assault. He is consumed with paranoid, partisan rage.
.. The method Republicans have used to defend Kavanaugh has consisted of suppressing most of the evidence that could be brought to bear in the hearing, and then complaining about the lack of evidence.
The FBI could investigate the charges — which might not settle the question, but would at least advance the inquiry, and use the threat of perjury to force any witnesses to give straight answers. The Senate could subpoena Kavanaugh’s friend, Mark Judge, an eyewitness to the alleged attack on Ford, and compel him to testify. They have refused repeated pleas to do either..
.. Kavanaugh himself has dodged and weaved on this. In a Fox News interview, he changed the subject when asked about an FBI investigation. He tried to deflect when asked by Senate Democrats, saying he would do whatever the committee wants (knowing full well they do not want the FBI to investigate.) When asked what he wants, Kavanaugh responded with several seconds of damning silence.
.. Kavanaugh deserves due process. So does Christine Blasey Ford. Only one of those people is standing in the way of it.
.. Why do I believe Kavanaugh is lying? The charges are credible, and his accusers are willing to put themselves at risk, with no apparent gain to bring them to the public. Kavanaugh has said too many things that strain credulity for all them to be plausibly true.
- He almost certainly lied about having had access to files stolen by Senate Republicans back when he was handling judicial nominations in the Bush administration.
- .. His explanation that the “Renate Alumni” was not a sexual reference is difficult to square with a fellow Renate Alumnus’s poem ( “You need a date / and it’s getting late / so don’t hesitate / to call Renate”) portraying her as a cheap date.
- .. His insistence “boof” and “devil’s triangle” from his yearbook were references to flatulence and a drinking game drew incredulous responses from people his age who have heard these terms.
His claim that the “Beach Week Ralph Club” was a reference to a weak stomach seems highly unlikely.
.. The accretion of curious details ultimately overwhelms the small possibility that he is a man wronged. The conviction he summoned is the righteous belief of an adult who feels he should not be denied the career reward due to him by the errors of his youth, and who decided from the outset to close the door to that period in his life. Perhaps he believes he has made amends for his cruelty. I see a liar who has the chance to prove his good faith innocence, and has conspicuously refused.
GREGG JARRETT OP-ED: DEMS HAVE VICTIMIZED KAVANAUGH, FORD, THE AMERICAN PEOPLE
If Judge Brett Kavanaugh was not telling the truth Thursday at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on his nomination to the Supreme Court, he is one of America’s greatest actors … The emotion Kavanaugh evinced during the hearing cannot be feigned. When it finally spilled out, it was real and raw. His justifiable anger at being falsely accused of sexually assaulting Professor Christine Blasey Ford when both were teenagers some 36 years ago was palpable.
Ford also told a credible story. During her testimony, she seemed authentic and sincere. However, when two people tell different and conflicting stories, the benefit of the doubt must always go to the accused. This is consistent with an important principle by which our democracy abides both inside and outside the courtroom: the presumption of innocence.
Kavanaugh laid bare the partisan motivations of Democrats for ruining his reputation and destroying his family. He condemned their actions for transforming the Senate confirmation process into “a national disgrace” and “replacing ‘advise and consent’ with ‘search and destroy.’”
American Bar Association, which called Kavanaugh ‘well-qualified,’ now asks FBI to investigate
Why Brett Kavanaugh Wasn’t Believable
Judge Kavanaugh, when it was his turn, was not laughing. He was yelling. He spent more than half an hour raging against Senate Democrats and the “Left” for “totally and permanently” destroying his name, his career, his family, his life. He called his confirmation process a “national disgrace.”
“You may defeat me in the final vote, but you will never get me to quit,” Judge Kavanaugh said, sounding like someone who suddenly doubted his confirmation to the Supreme Court — an outcome that seemed preordained only a couple of weeks ago.
Judge Kavanaugh’s defiant fury might be understandable coming from someone who believes himself innocent of the grotesque charges he’s facing. Yet it was also evidence of an unsettling temperament in a man trying to persuade the nation of his judicial demeanor.
.. As he put it in his testimony, “What goes around, comes around,” in the partisan vortex that has been intensifying in Washington for decades now. His open contempt for the Democrats on the committee also raised further questions about his own fair-mindedness, and it served as a reminder of his decades as a Republican warrior who would take no prisoners.
.. He gave coy answers when pressed about what was clearly a sexual innuendo in his high-school yearbook.
He insisted over and over that others Dr. Blasey named as attending the gathering had “said it didn’t happen,” when in fact at least two of them have said only that they don’t recall it — and one of them told a reporter that she believes Dr. Blasey.
.. Judge Kavanaugh clumsily dodged a number of times when senators asked him about his drinking habits. When Senator Amy Klobuchar gently pressed him about whether he’d ever blacked out from drinking, he at first wouldn’t reply directly. “I don’t know, have you?” he replied — a condescending and dismissive response to the legitimate exercise of a senator’s duty of advise and consent. (Later, after a break in the hearing, he apologized.)
.. Judge Kavanaugh gave categorical denials a number of times, including, at other points, that he’d ever blacked out from too much drinking. Given numerous reports now of his heavy drinking in college, such a blanket denial is hard to believe.
.. then there’s the fact that she gains nothing by coming forward. She is in hiding now with her family in the face of death threats.
.. cowardice of the committee’s 11 Republicans, all of them men, and none of them, apparently, capable of asking Dr. Blasey a single question.
.. Eventually, as Judge Kavanaugh testified, the Republican senators ventured out from behind their shield. Doubtless seeking to ape President’s Trump style and win his approval, they began competing with each other to make the most ferocious denunciation of their Democratic colleagues and the most heartfelt declaration of sympathy for Judge Kavanaugh, in a show of empathy far keener than they managed to muster for Dr. Blasey.
.. Pressed over and over by Democratic senators, Judge Kavanaugh never could come up with a clear answer for why he wouldn’t also want a fair, neutral F.B.I. investigation into the allegations against him — the kind of investigation the agency routinely performs, and that Dr. Blasey has called for. At one point, though, he acknowledged that it was common sense to put some questions to other potential witnesses besides him.
.. When Senator Patrick Leahy asked whether the judge was the inspiration for a hard-drinking character named Bart O’Kavanaugh in a memoir about teenage alcoholism by Mr. Judge, Judge Kavanaugh replied, “You’d have to ask him.”
Asking Mr. Judge would be a great idea. Unfortunately he’s hiding out in a Delaware beach town and Senate Republicans are refusing to subpoena him.
.. Why? Mr. Judge is the key witness in Dr. Blasey’s allegation. He has said he has no recollection of the party or of any assault. But he hasn’t faced live questioning to test his own memory and credibility. And Dr. Blasey is far from alone in describing Judge Kavanaugh and Mr. Judge as heavy drinkers; several of Judge Kavanaugh’s college classmates have said the same.
.. If the committee will not make a more serious effort, the only choice for senators seeking to protect the credibility of the Supreme Court will be to vote no.
Mark Judge’s Name Keeps Coming Up. Here’s What We Know.
Weeks later, Dr. Blasey testified, she saw Mr. Judge working at a Safeway grocery store in Potomac, Md. In his memoir, Mr. Judge mentioned that he had worked for a few weeks at a supermarket in the summer before his senior year, helping people load groceries into their cars. He wrote that he often showed up at his early-morning shift hung over from the night before.
.. Some former classmates of the two men have said that aspects of Dr. Blasey’s recollections of Mr. Judge rang true.
The book describes a person named “Bart O’Kavanaugh” as having “puked in someone’s car the other night” and “passed out on his way back from a party.” A former classmate of Judge Kavanaugh’s said that the judge earned the nickname “Bart” after a Georgetown Prep teacher garbled his name.
.. Judge Kavanaugh about the “Bart O’Kavanaugh” passage. Mr. Kavanaugh said that the book was a “fictionalized” account and that only Mr. Judge could answer about his intention.
.. statement by Ms. Swetnick painted a similar portrait of the two young men as “attached to the hip” in high school and made allegations of parties where women were drugged and “gang raped.”
.. Under questioning Thursday, Judge Kavanaugh said that he and Mr. Judge became friends in ninth grade and that they shared the same group of friends. Mr. Judge was popular in school, Judge Kavanaugh said, and a talented writer.