ACCUSER SET TO TESTIFY
Senate panel agrees to hear her Thursday
WASHINGTON — The woman accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of a decades-old sexual assault has accepted a Senate committee’s request to tell her side next week, with she and the Senate panel agreeing tentatively late last night to hold that session Thursday.
It was not immediately clear whether the Republican-run Senate Judiciary Committee would agree to more talks with Christine Blasey Ford’s team. Also unclear was whether she was offering to speak in a public session or a private one. The committee wanted her to appear Wednesday, but she preferred her earlier request for Thursday, according to a person familiar with the negotiations who was not authorized to discuss the matter publicly.
Her lawyers’ letter to the committee’s GOP majority was released yesterday just at the 2:30 p.m. deadline set by the chairman, Sen. Chuck Grassley, to respond to the panel’s latest offer. Grassley (R-Iowa) had set a possible vote tomorrow to decide whether to recommend Kavanaugh’s nomination to the full Senate.
Earlier, a senior official at the White House said the letter amounted to “an ask to continue ‘negotiations’ without committing to anything. It’s a clever way to push off the vote Monday without committing to appear Wednesday.” The official was not authorized to publicly discuss the Senate negotiations and spoke on condition of anonymity.
The lawyers wrote that Ford “accepts the Committee’s request to provide her first-hand knowledge of Brett Kavanaugh’s sexual misconduct next week.”
Attorneys Debra Katz and Lisa Banks said many aspects of Grassley’s latest offer were “fundamentally inconsistent” with the committee’s promise of a “fair, impartial investigation.” They said they remained disappointed by the “bullying” that “tainted the process.” Yet they remained “hopeful that we can reach agreement on details.”
It was unclear whether Grassley would permit more negotiations yesterday, with patience among Republicans running thin. The GOP is facing enormous pressure from its base of conservative leaders and voters to swiftly approve Kavanaugh, who would become the second of President Trump’s nominees to sit on the nation’s highest court, before the Nov. 6 election.
A spokesman for GOP Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, a committee member, tweeted that Ford “agreed to nothing. She rejected the committee’s offer to testify Wednesday.”
Ford says an inebriated Kavanaugh pinned her on a bed, muffled her cries and tried removing her clothes when both were teenagers in the 1980s. Kavanaugh has denied doing this and said he wants to appear before the committee as soon as possible to clear his name.
In backing away from his deadline, Grassley underscored the sensitivity with which Senate Republicans have tried handling Ford. Moderate female voters will be pivotal in many races in the elections and the #MeToo movement has elevated the political potency of how women alleging abuse are treated.
Friday was the latest in a string of tumultuous days for Kavanaugh, whose ascension to the Supreme Court seemed a sure bet until Ford emerged last weekend and provided details of the alleged assault.