Column: Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation looked bad at the time. It was even worse
President Trump and his party never cared a bit about whether Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted women.
Kavanaugh‘s 2018 confirmation to the Supreme Court was going to be rammed through no matter what, a new report shows.
Trump was not exactly the kind of executive for whom allegations of sexual assault would ever be a deal breaker. He has since been found liable for what a judge described as “rape” and had previously boasted about sexually assaulting women just because he could.
And thanks in part to Kavanaugh’s elevation to the high court, we now live in a country where reproductive rights have been ripped away from women and a president could arguably get away with murder.
Kamala Harris noted his affinity for autocrats such as Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban, whom he praised during their debate. Democracy experts share her concern.
To refresh your memory, after Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings began, two women stepped forward with claims that the FBI had missed in its routine background checks.
In a letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Christine Blasey Ford, a California college professor, alleged that while they were in high school, a drunken Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her as his friend looked on.
Deborah Ramirez, a Kavanaugh classmate at Yale, said he drunkenly exposed himself to her at a dorm room party. Kavanaugh’s possibly unhealthy relationship with beer, which he memorably denied while acknowledging his affection for the beverage, was also an issue during the confirmation hearings.
Republicans say journalists shouldn’t be pointing out their lies. But in the era of post-factual MAGA politics, most voters are grateful for the service.
The Senate Judiciary Committee decided to give the FBI a week to conduct a “supplemental background investigation” into the claims. Kavanaugh histrionically denied them, saying at one point that they were concocted as “revenge on behalf of the Clintons.” Kavanaugh had been a member of the team, led by independent counsel Kenneth Starr, that investigated sexual misconduct by President Clinton.
The FBI, which could have interviewed many witnesses who may have helped corroborate the allegations against Kavanaugh, severely limited the scope of its supplemental investigation, interviewing only 10 people. They did not include Ford, whose attorney had repeatedly requested an interview, or Kavanaugh.
The bureau disclosed in 2021 that it received more than 4,500 calls and messages related to Kavanaugh. According to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat who requested the information, none of them was investigated.
“People who were key to corroborating my story have not been contacted,” Ramirez said at the time. “I feel like I’m being silenced.”
That’s because she was being silenced.
The new report by Whitehouse, a member of the Judiciary Committee and the chairman of its federal courts subcommittee, confirms what many have long suspected: The supplemental background investigation was a “sham” that was tightly controlled by the Trump White House even as the then-president insisted the FBI had “free rein” to look into the allegations.
The White House, the report says, “exercised total control over the scope of the investigation, preventing the FBI from interviewing relevant witnesses and following up on tips.”
The FBI has acknowledged that. In a widely quoted statement, the bureau said that it responds to requests from the White House counsel’s office to conduct background investigations of candidates for government posts. It said it does not have the authority to expand such investigations beyond what the White House asks for.
“Multiple Senators expressly cited the supplemental background investigation’s apparent inability to uncover corroborating evidence of the allegations against Kavanaugh as a ground for voting to confirm Kavanaugh,” Whitehouse wrote. “Yet the supplemental background investigation was flawed and incomplete, as the FBI did not follow up on numerous leads that could have produced potentially corroborating or otherwise relevant information.”
The supplemental investigation was simply a #MeToo-era exercise in providing cover to Republicans who wanted to appear to take the allegations against Kavanaugh seriously — when in fact they were champing at the bit to confirm another ultraconservative justice.
I happened to be in a pool of potential jurors for a murder trial last week (I wasn’t selected). Interviewing the prospective jurors, the prosecutor repeatedly made the point that a witness’ testimony does not have to be corroborated if the jury believes they are telling the truth. My thoughts immediately turned to Ford as well as to Anita Hill, who so memorably testified in 1991 that she was sexually harassed by Justice Clarence Thomas.
I remember watching Ford testify that a young Kavanaugh shoved her into a bedroom, pushed her onto a bed and covered her mouth to mute her screams. “It was hard for me to breathe,” she testified, “and I thought that Brett was accidentally going to kill me.” She said his friend Mark Judge was there too, also inebriated and laughing. (Judge — whose 1997 memoir, “Wasted: Tales of a GenX Drunk,” chronicles an alcohol addiction that nearly killed him — denied her story.)
I have rarely seen a witness more credible and believable than Ford, who testified that the assault was indelibly seared into her memory and continued to haunt her as an adult. The system let her down.
As Whitehouse told Rolling Stone last week, “A victim who’s finally screwed up her courage to come and tell somebody, I believe, is entitled to at that point the best goddamn investigation you can pull together — so that at least she knows that somewhere, somebody took her seriously and did their level best.”
Whitehouse‘s report may not change anything, but it is a public service. It has exposed the corrupt process through which Kavanaugh was elevated to a lifetime appointment on the nation’s highest court.
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