The darkest cloud
Two things, and only two things, seem clear a year later in the Brett Kavanaugh sexual allegation debacle.
One is that Republicans only pretended to engage the FBI last year to investigate new charges against Kavanaugh pursuant to an absurdly hyped compromise by former Republican Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona and Democratic Sen. Christopher Coons of Delaware.
It is that the Republicans used an intentionally abbreviated “review” and secret FBI report to accuse Democrats of smearing Kavanaugh and thus fire up the right-wing base for the midterm elections.
The FBI should never have been hamstrung in that way, told to leave stones unturned and to quit in five days no matter what.
If you’re looking for a real scandal involving the FBI, and everyone seems to be, the Trump administration’s abuse of the agency in this affair would be it.
The second clarity is that The New York Times has blown another one. I think the usually great newspaper may need new leadership.
Two of the paper’s reporters have a new book on the Kavanaugh affair that produces information that several persons supporting an allegation against Kavanaugh from his days at Yale by a woman named Deborah Ramirez were willing to be interviewed. The book reports that the FBI declined to bother with those interviews because it had been pre-emptively limited to a short list of Trump administration-assigned interviews.
A further revelation of the book was that a prominent Washington, D.C., man had wanted to be interviewed in support of another allegation of collegiate drunken vulgarity toward a woman by Kavanaugh, but that the FBI also declined pursuant to its assignment to oblige that request.
The Times blew it twice, this way: It oddly limited its coverage Sunday to an opinion-section piece on the book, rather than developing a news article on its supposed new information. And it omitted the book’s acknowledgement that the woman in the second alleged incident had declined to be interviewed for the book and that friends of hers had said she had no recollection of it.
The Times subsequently published an admission that it had left out that fact.
The effect is less that the omission damaged the book’s or the Sunday review’s credibility, since that tended to break down along the angry partisan divide anyway. The effect is that The Times gave right-wing assaults on its supposed “fake news” a tankful of jet fuel.
What we get from these two matters of clarity is a tainted member of the Supreme Court and a tainted beacon of mainstream journalism. That’s all. People of both stripes emerge with a storied American institution that they can deplore.
Republicans—starting with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose purpose in life is to produce a conservative U.S. Supreme Court majority—were not going to let anything derail Kavanaugh’s nomination. They feared a derailment might jeopardize a substitute nomination, embolden Democrats and besmirch President Trump—as if he could be further besmirched—for nominating an unworthy choice.
What happened, you’ll recall, is that the moderate-posturing Flake famously proposed to his Democratic pal Coons that one way to deal with Dr. Christina Blasey-Ford’s dramatic allegations against Kavanaugh from high school was for the Senate Judiciary Committee to take a week’s delay for a further FBI investigation.
That investigation indeed took place—such as it was. It was more “review” than investigation. It wrapped up in a single work-week. The Trump administration designed it that way.
Republicans responded to the book and news reports as a fake-news smear on a pristine man from desperate Democrats.
That’s an easier response than explaining why the FBI would be told from the highest level to investigate only a little.
It’s easier than explaining what Trump and Republicans must have been afraid of if professional investigative agents were allowed to do their jobs.
Now we confront the resurrection of a futile political fight. Several Democratic presidential candidates pander to the left by calling for Kavanaugh’s impeachment on the basis that he lied under oath by categorically denying what we now are told may have happened and that the FBI was restrained from investigating. And Republicans pander to the right by deploring desperate and evil Democratic smears of this good man, cleared as he was, you see, by that week’s “review.”
Kavanaugh will not be impeached. He will stay on the court until he dies, tainted all the while, but less by his alleged drunken creepiness in high school and college than by his vehement categorical denials of charges he didn’t ask Trump and McConnell to permit a full investigation into.
Why wouldn’t he have wanted the absolute clearance he presumably would have been confident of—if innocent, that is?
The behavior itself conceivably could be dismissed as the youthful drunkenness of a fine adult man who can’t be sure now of how he behaved when beer-blitzed then, and is sorry now if anything resembling these accusations is true.
But that’s not how Kavanaugh and Republicans played it. Absolute denial with rigged investigation—that’s how they played it.
Yet the most operative lingering question is not what happened back then at Yale. It’s about what happened last year. Why did Trump, McConnell and Republicans resist a full investigation?
That will always be the darkest cloud on Kavanaugh’s supreme perch and lifetime gig.
The cloud over The New York Times is that the paper of record is beginning to look at times like the paper of blunder.