High drama over high court seat
Senators hear accuser, nominee; vote today
WASHINGTON — Christine Blasey Ford recounted for a rapt Senate committee Thursday her memory of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulting her at a summer gathering of teenagers in 1982.
“I am here today not because I want to be,” Ford, a California psychology professor, said at the beginning of her testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. “I am terrified. I am here because I believe it is my civic duty to tell you what happened to me while Brett Kavanaugh and I were in high school.”
Later in the day, Kavanaugh responded with a denial, saying he had never sexually assaulted her or anyone else. He blamed a “calculated and coordinated political hit” to deny him a seat on the high court.
“This is a circus. The consequences will be with us for decades,” Kavanaugh said, adding to the committee’s Democrats: “You may defeat me in the final vote, but you’ll never get me to quit — never.”
He broke down several times, including when he described a moment when his wife, Ashley, and their 10-year-old daughter were recently praying. His daughter said they should pray for the woman who had accused him of wrongdoing, he said.
Ford’s voice shook at times as she spoke, and her face was drawn. Occasion-
ally, she took deep breaths, swallowed and blinked back tears, but she remained composed throughout the morning.
She described a drunken Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge pushing her into a bedroom and locking the door. She said Judge watched while Kavanaugh got on top of her and tried to remove her clothes.
“I believed he was going to rape me,” she said. “I tried to yell for help. When I did, Brett put his hand over my mouth to stop me from yelling. This is what terrified me the most.”
Ford said she eventually escaped the bedroom and left the house.
Pressed on whether she was certain her attacker was Kavanaugh, Ford replied: “One hundred percent.”
Immediately after the hearing adjourned, President Donald Trump tweeted that “Judge Kavanaugh showed America exactly why I nominated him.”
“His testimony was powerful, honest, and riveting,” the president wrote. “Democrats’ search and destroy strategy is disgraceful and this process has been a total sham and effort to delay, obstruct, and resist. The Senate must vote!”
Republican senators said late Thursday that the Judiciary Committee plans to vote today on Kavanaugh’s nomination.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Ford’s testimony had not shaken his support of Kavanaugh. He called her “a nice lady who has come forward to tell a hard story that is uncorroborated.”
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, the longest-serving member of the Senate, was asked whether Ford was “credible” in her testimony.
“I don’t think she’s un-credible,” he said. “I think she’s an attractive, good witness. But it’s way early.”
Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said in a statement after the hearing that he still supports Kavanaugh and that the Senate should go forward with a vote.
“Judge Kavanaugh gave compelling testimony, with specific and detailed recollection. His testimony is corroborated by multiple other statements and evidence. The Democrats’ disgraceful smear campaign of character assassination must come to an end. It’s time for the Senate to vote,” the statement said.
Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said Thursday that Kavanaugh is “qualified to serve.”
Corker said it took “courage” for Ford to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee. But he said the testimony presented no evidence to corroborate her allegation that he sexually assaulted her when they were teens.
Corker said he plans “to vote to confirm him.”
But Kavanaugh’s fate likely rests with only a handful of undecided senators — Republicans Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Jeff Flake of Arizona, chief among them.
Late Thursday, Flake said Ford’s account “was compelling, but she’s lacking corroboration from those who were there.”
Asked how he will vote, Flake said, “let me process it.”
ABOUT ‘INTEGRITY’
During the hearing, the 21 members of the Judiciary Committee appeared riveted as Ford testified in vivid detail.
Numerous senators leaned forward in their seats, elbows on the table, intently focused.
Twenty-seven years ago, law professor Anita Hill testified before the Judiciary Committee that then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her when they worked together at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
But Ford’s testimony involved details of an alleged physical attack on a teenage girl.
She was calm and at times clinical in describing about how memory works, drawing on her training as a psychologist.
When asked what she remembered the most about her encounter with Kavanaugh, Ford replied: “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter, the uproarious laughter between the two. And they’re having fun at my expense.”
Democrats have called on Judge to be forced to appear before the committee.
On Thursday afternoon, his attorney, Barbara Van Gelder, declined to answer questions about her client until Ford and Kavanaugh had testified.
Van Gelder told The Washington Post earlier this week that her client had nothing to provide the committee because he does not recall being present for the sexual assault that Ford described.
Inside the small hearing room, senators alternated between being comforting and solicitous with Ford — and combative with one another.
“I want to apologize to you both for the way you’ve been treated,” the committee’s chairman, Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa., said as he opened the hearing, referring to Ford and Kavanaugh.
Republicans accused Democrats of holding on to Ford’s allegations for a last-minute attack on Kavanaugh, who had appeared poised to be approved to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court.
Grassley said Democrats on the committee refused to join Republicans in questioning Kavanaugh about Ford’s charges when they first were revealed to the full committee. “Which leads me then to wonder: If they’re really concerned with going to the truth, why wouldn’t you want to talk to the accused?” he said.
Democrats said their Republican colleagues in the majority had no interest in finding out the truth, saying they refused to call Judge as a witness and had said there was no need for an FBI investigation into the charges.
“It’s about the integrity of that institution,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., referring to the Supreme Court, “and this institution.”
Ford said her initial motivation for telling her Congress member about her encounter with Kavanaugh was to try to prevent him from getting the nomination. She knew there was a list of qualified nominees being considered, she said, and she hoped that if Trump and members of Congress knew her story, another candidate would be selected. She also called a tip line at The Washington Post.
She said she went public in an article in The Washington Post only because word of her allegations had gotten out and that other reporters had shown up at her home and in her classroom.
In an unusual move, the Republican senators on the committee, all male, turned over their time for questions to Rachel Mitchell, a veteran sex-crimes prosecutor from Arizona.
Mitchell started the morning by greeting Ford with a smile and an expression of empathy: “We haven’t met. … I just wanted to tell you that what first struck me from your statement this morning is that you were terrified. I just wanted to let you know, I’m very sorry. That’s not right.”
The format — five minutes of questioning for the prosecutor, five minutes for a Democratic senator — often frustrated Mitchell’s efforts to highlight Ford’s inability to remember key details of the day, including where exactly the event took place and how she got home.
Ford said her “best estimate” was that before the gathering she had been at Columbia Country Club in Chevy Chase, Md., where she frequently swam. She said she had not been drinking or been on any medication.
Ford said she did not recall whether she had expected Kavanaugh to be at the gathering. She did expect Kavanaugh’s friend Judge and her close friend Leland Ingham to be present, she said.
Kavanaugh and Judge, she said, “were extremely inebriated. They had clearly been drinking prior [to the gathering], and the other people at the party had not.”
Toward the end of the morning, Ford grew emotional as Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., told her, “I have found your testimony powerful and credible, and I believe you.”
“You have inspired and given courage to women to come forward” and inspired men, he said, “to listen respectfully to women survivors, and men who have survived sexual attack, and that is a profound public service regardless of what happens with this nomination.”
‘NATIONAL DISGRACE’
Kavanaugh entered the committee room Thursday afternoon and started to testify with a statement he said he had shown only one other person.
“This confirmation process has become a national disgrace,” he said in opening remarks written only 24 hours before. “The Constitution gives the Senate an important role in the confirmation process, but you have replaced ‘advice and consent’ with ‘search and destroy.’”
“My family and my name have been totally and permanently destroyed,” he said.
He directly addressed the portrait painted by Ford as a drunken young man who tried to rape her and muffled her screams as she pleaded for help. “I liked beer. I still like beer. But I did not drink beer to the point of blacking out, and I never sexually assaulted anyone,” he said.
Kavanaugh cited evidence — the testimony of other witnesses who said they have no memory of the assault, and his own “very precise” cal-
endars from the summer of 1982 — in an effort to prove that he was never at a party with Ford and that the assault never happened.
And he dismissed accusations raised by two other women, Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick, who say they either experienced or witnessed sexual misconduct by a drunken Kavanaugh in high school or in college.
“The Swetnick thing is a joke,” he said under questioning. “That is a farce.”
He lashed out over the time it took the committee to convene the hearing after Ford’s allegations emerged, singling out the Democrats for “unleashing” forces against him.
Repeatedly Democrats asked Kavanaugh to call for an FBI investigation into the claims.
“I welcome whatever the committee wants to do,” he said.
When Sen. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., pressed him on whether he ever drank so much he blacked out, he replied, “Have you?” After a break in the proceedings, he returned and apologized to Klobuchar. She said her father was an alcoholic.
Republicans alternated between their own anger, and frustration at the allegations and the process.
“You’re right to be angry,” Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, said to Kavanaugh.
Graham, his voice rising, called the hearing the “most unethical sham since I’ve been in politics.”
Information for this article was contributed by Robert Barnes, Seung Min, Kim Mike DeBonis, Robert Costa, Ann Marimow, Gabriel Pogrund, Elise Viebeck and John Wagner of The Washington
Post; by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Nicholas Fandos of The New York
Times; and by Lisa Mascaro,Alan Fram, Kevin Freking, Mary Clare Jalonick, Padmananda Rama, Matthew Daly, Julie Pace, J. Scott Applewhite and Carolyn Kaster of The Associated Press.