FBI finishing Kavanaugh inquiry
Report, vote still expected by this week
WASHINGTON — The FBI is expected to complete its investigation into allegations of sexual assault against Judge Brett Kavanaugh and deliver the results to the Senate as early as today, and Republican leaders said Tuesday that they expect to vote on the nomination this week.
“We’ll have an FBI report this week, and we’ll have a vote this week,”
Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, told reporters after the Republicans’ weekly policy luncheon Tuesday. But McConnell would not say whether that would be a final vote or a procedural vote allowing the Senate to begin debate.
Once the investigation is completed, the FBI will send reports about its interviews to the Senate, where
members will have a chance to review them. Several Republicans — including Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, the No. 2 Republican — said Tuesday that they would like to see the findings made public in some form.
“People are not going to be satisfied until some public statement about what the FBI supplemental background investigation shows,” Cornyn said.
McConnell later said that “only senators will be able to see” the FBI report. He said “it shouldn’t take long” for senators to read the findings.
“That will not be used as another reason for delay, I can tell you that,” he said.
Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said he wants senators to receive an FBI briefing on its findings at least 24 hours before the chamber takes its first procedural vote on Kavanaugh.
Meanwhile, attorneys for Christine Blasey Ford, who says she was sexually assaulted by Kavanaugh at a party when she and Kavanaugh were teenagers, wrote a letter to FBI Director Christopher Wray asking why the FBI hasn’t contacted their client after she offered to cooperate in the FBI’s reopened background investigation of Kavanaugh.
In a letter Tuesday night, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee pressed Ford to turn over more information to support her claim and accused her lawyers of “withholding material evidence.” Sen. Charles Grassley repeated his request for notes from Ford’s therapy sessions, details of her communications with The Washington
Post and any recordings of her taking a lie-detector test.
The senator said he is requesting the recordings because the committee has obtained a letter that “raises specific concerns” about the reliability of Ford’s polygraph test. In the statement, a man who says he is Ford’s former boyfriend says he saw Ford, a psychology professor, coach a friend on how to be less nervous during a polygraph examination.
If true, the claim could contradict testimony Ford gave last week, when she told senators she had never given tips or advice to anyone taking a lie-detector test.
Also Tuesday, an attorney for another accuser, Deborah Ramirez, said he’s seen no indication that the FBI has reached out to any of the 20 people who Ramirez told them may be able to corroborate her account that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her when they were Yale freshmen. The attorney, John Clune, said Ramirez was interviewed by the FBI on Sunday and provided agents with the witnesses’ contact numbers.
Clune said he is concerned that the bureau “is not conducting — or not being permitted to conduct — a serious investigation.”
Details were scant about precisely who the FBI was interviewing, but agents are known to have interviewed at least four people.
They include Mark Judge, who Ford has said was in the bedroom where, she says, a drunken Kavanaugh sexually attacked her at a 1982 high school gathering. Also interviewed were two other people Ford said were present but in a different room: Patrick “P.J.” Smyth and Leland Keyser. Judge, Smyth
and Keyser say they don’t recall the incident described by Ford.
Judge’s lawyer, Barbara Van Gelder, said in a statement Tuesday that “Mr. Judge completed his FBI interview. We are not commenting on the questions the FBI asked Mr. Judge.”
Three Republican senators have refused to allow Kavanaugh’s nomination to move forward until the FBI conducted an additional inquiry into Kavanaugh’s behavior, including an in-person interview with Judge.
An author, filmmaker and journalist who has written for conservative publications, Judge was the subject of numerous questions during last week’s testimony of Ford and Kavanaugh.
Ford said Kavanaugh and Judge “were drunkenly laughing during the attack. They seemed to be having a very good time,” adding that “Mark seemed ambivalent, at times urging Brett on and at times telling him to stop. A couple of times I made eye contact with Mark and thought he might try to help me, but he did not.”
Judge has disputed her account. In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee, he said “I do not recall the events described by Dr. Ford in her testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee today. I never saw Brett act in the manner Dr. Ford describes.”
In an earlier interview with The New York Times before Ford’s name was publicly known, Judge said he never saw an encounter like the one she alleged.
Judge also has been mentioned by Julie Swetnick, another of Kavanaugh’s accusers. Swetnick has said Kavanaugh and Judge attended parties in high school where women were gang raped.
Judge and Kavanaugh have both denied Swetnick’s allegations.
At a campaign rally in Southaven, Miss., on Tuesday night, President Donald Trump ran through a list of what he described as holes in Ford’s testimony.
“How did you get home? ‘I don’t remember,’” Trump said. “How did you get there? ‘I don’t remember.’ Where is the place? ‘I don’t remember.’ How many years ago was it? ‘I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know.’”
Imitating her, he added: “But I had one beer — that’s the only thing I remember.”
It marked the sharpest criticism by Trump of Ford since she came forward publicly with the allegation. He had previously called Ford a “very credible witness.”
BAR FIGHT INQUIRY
Meanwhile, a former Yale University basketball player was scheduled to meet with the FBI on Tuesday to discuss Kavanaugh’s alleged role in instigating a bar fight more than three decades ago, an incident that, according to a police report made public late Monday, led police in New Haven, Conn., to interview the future Supreme Court nominee.
Charles Ludington told The Washington Post the brawl occurred in September 1985, after a UB40 concert. At a bar called Demery’s, a few students thought they spotted the band’s lead singer.
Ludington said he approached the man to ask. “Turns out it wasn’t him,” he said. “He was New Haven tough. He said something aggressive, like ‘screw off.’”
Kavanaugh escalated the situation, Ludington said, replying with an expletive or something similar, “and then threw his drink in the guy’s face.”
A White House spokesman did not respond to emails about Ludington’s account. A police report documenting the incident was first reported Monday night by The New York Times.
In the report, a New Haven police officer wrote that after 1 a.m. on Sept. 26, 1985, a man found bleeding from the ear told officers that another man — identified in the report as Kavanaugh — “threw ice at him for some unknown reason.”
Ludington said the aggressive act by Kavanaugh touched off a brief melee. Soon the man and Kavanaugh
“were connected in some headlock or wrestling form,” Ludington said.
Within moments, another Kavanaugh friend, Yale student Chris Dudley, was involved, Ludington said. In a brief interview, Dudley disputed Ludington’s account.
The police report noted that Dudley was taken to a “detention facility,” but Mark Sherman, a Stamford, Conn., lawyer representing him, said in an interview Tuesday that Dudley was “never arrested by Yale or New Haven Police, was never charged with a crime, and never set foot in court.”
Ludington said Dudley took a pint glass or beer bottle and smashed it against the man’s head. Soon both Dudley and the man were bloodied, and friends were rushing in to pull the brawlers apart, said Ludington and Warren N. Sams III, a fourth Yale classmate who said he observed the altercation.
Sams, a lawyer in Atlanta who was a fraternity brother of Kavanaugh and Dudley, said he does not remember seeing Kavanaugh there. Sams said he and other friends helped Dudley out of the bar.
Sams said he recalled seeing blood on Dudley’s hand and worrying that the star basketball player, who went on to a career in the National Basketball Association, had injured himself. “The fight was over,” Sams said. “It was a scuffle. And then someone was pulling Dudley back and saying, ‘Help me get Chris out of here.’”
Richard Unger, who graduated from Yale with Kavanaugh in 1987, also recalled the brawl at Demery’s because he lived directly across the street, in Saybrook College, one of the university’s residential colleges.
Unger did not witness the brawl, but he was at the bar and remembered Kavanaugh, Dudley and Ludington being questioned by two police officers.
Reached briefly by phone, Dudley said, “I don’t know what [Ludington] is talking about.”
The Washington Post could find no record of a formal charge or conviction from the event.
Last week, Kavanaugh told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he drank but was never out of control. “I drank beer with my friends. Almost everyone did. Sometimes I had too many beers. Sometimes others did. I liked beer. I still like beer. But I did not drink beer to the point of blacking out,” he said during his testimony.
Ludington said his recollection of Kavanaugh differed.
“I saw him quite drunk. There were certainly many times when he could not remember what was going on,” he said, adding that “there’s an angry streak that comes out when Brett drinks.”
Information for this article was contributed by Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Michael D. Shear of The New York Times; by Chris Strohm, Laura Litvan, Anna Edgerton, Arit John, Sahil Kapur and Erik Wasson of Bloomberg News; by John Wagner, Mike DeBonis, Gabriel Pogrund, Seung Min Kim, Emma Brown, Felicia Sonmez, Carol D. Leonnig, Aaron C. Davis, Amy Gardner and Alice Crites of The Washington Post; and by Alan Fram, Michael Balsamo, Eric Tucker, Lisa Mascaro, Padmananda Rama, Matthew Daly and Mary Clare Jalonick of The Associated Press.