Panel backs Kavanaugh amid calls for FBI probe
TRUMP NOMINEE’S SENATE CONFIRMATION VOTE MAY BE DELAYED
Two key Republican senators demanded a delay in Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation vote, saying the FBI should investigate claims of sexual assault levelled against the nominee.
The demand yesterday by GOP Senator Jeff Flake for a one-week FBI investigation before a full Senate vote puts the onus on President Donald Trump to reopen the FBI’s background investigation into Christine Blasey Ford’s claim that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in high school. Kavanaugh categorically denied it.
Minutes later, Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska told reporters she backed Flake’s proposal. “I support an FBI investigation,” she said.
A holdout by two Republicans would leave the party short of the 50 votes needed to confirm Kavanaugh on party lines. Trump told reporters at the White House, “I will be totally reliant on Grassley and what he decides to do,” referring to Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley.
Trump said he found Ford “a very credible witness.”
He thought Ford’s testimony on Thursday to the Senate Judiciary Committee “was very compelling” and that “she looks like a very fine woman, very fine woman.” But Trump also said he though Kavanaugh’s adamant denial “really something that I hadn’t seen before. It was incredible.”
Less than an hour earlier, the Judiciary Committee voted 11-10 on party lines to send Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Senate floor.
Flake of Arizona, who had been undecided until yesterday morning, announced his demand for an FBI investigation not long after announcing his support for Kavanaugh.
I would “only be comfortable moving on the floor until the FBI has done more investigation than they have already,’ Flake said. “It may not take them a week. We owe them due diligence.”
They say there are no heroes and no leaders left in Washington. Well one showed up in front of the Senate judiciary committee, and her name is Dr Christine Blasey Ford.
Victims are supposed to be many things: suffering creatures who struggle to withstand the klieg lights of a court, or a hearing. Ford was something else entirely.
Her pain was clear each time her voice cracked and her eyes welled with tears. But her courage, decency and honesty was even clearer as she walked carefully over ground she plainly never wanted to revisit from her teenage years.
When Democratic senators were trying to score political points, she stuck to the facts as she remembered them, and the science behind why those memories are so vivid. When the Republican prosecutor was trying to poke holes in her credibility and memory, she offered her honest help in patiently answering an endless line of small-bore questions.
The contrast with the US supreme court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, could not have been greater.
He lapsed into his old role as a political hack, accusing a wide range of actors for his suffering: the media, the Democrats on the judiciary committee, a vast leftwing conspiracy, the Clintons. He predicted political Armageddon as sex was weaponised to destroy reputations, notably his own, as he was just on the verge of success.
“For decades to come I fear the country will reap the whirlwind,” he declared. “When I did at least OK enough at the hearings that it looked like I might actually get confirmed, a new tactic was needed. Some of you were lying in wait and had it ready.”
Cold, calculating questions
As a federal appeals court judge, Kavanaugh’s performance was jarringly unbalanced and at times unhinged.
As a former staffer to Ken Starr, the man who investigated Bill Clinton’s sexual scandals in excruciating and public detail, Kavanaugh seemed oblivious to his part in the very whirlwind that swept him up.
Ford was asked about her strongest memory of the assault. The response was deeply moving to anyone with a living, beating heart. “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter, the uproarious laughter, and their having fun at my expense,” Ford said, as she turned her eyes down to her lap. “I was underneath one of them while the two laughed. Two friends having a really good time with one another.”
Another senator asked Ford what was her degree of certainty about being assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh.
“100 per cent” she said firmly. While Democratic senators could express sympathy for Ford and the searing memories of her sexual assault, their Republican counterparts gave their time to a technical deposition. The questions by Rachel Mitchell, a sex crimes prosecutor from Arizona, were cold and calculating.
The same could not be said for the prosecutor’s questions of Kavanaugh. The more he was grilled about sex and alcohol, the worse he sounded. Did he drink to the point where he blacked out, or woke up in a different place, or found his clothes somewhere else? The questions themselves were tarnishing Kavanaugh even as they were in- tended to clear him.
“We drank beer. And sometimes we probably had too many beers,” Kavanaugh said, clinging to the only talking point that made him seem comfortable. “We drank beer. We liked beer.”
For a guy who claimed to have concentrated on his academics, it wasn’t clear that Kavanaugh had concentrated on preparing for a hearing that will define his career and reputation. He had no coherent response for why he couldn’t support an FBI investigation into Ford’s account.
Kavanaugh’s nomination may, or may not, survive the Senate hearing on Thursday. But his credibility, testifying under oath for a lifetime job on the highest court in the land, did not.
Brett Kavanaugh should know that he stumbled badly just as he believed he was striding towards his rightful place on the Supreme Court.