Legal experts: Mark Judge should testify
A key voice was missing from the Senate hearing yesterday as Christine Blasey Ford gave her testimony of when Brett Kavanaugh allegedly sexually assaulted her: the other man she said was in the room.
Mark Judge claims he has no recollection of the alleged assault that Ford said happened sometime in the 1980s, according to reports, and was holed up at a friend’s Delaware beach house earlier this week.
Judge told the Senate Judiciary Committee through a lawyer, “I have no more information to offer to the committee, and I do not wish to speak publicly regarding the incidents described in Dr. Ford’s letter.”
In her testimony yesterday, Ford said it could have been Judge who pushed her into the bedroom where the alleged sexual assault occurred.
Several Democratic senators yesterday suggested Judge should be testifying, and legal experts agreed.
“It’s outrageous. The fact that the U.S. Senate claims they are trying to have a fair hearing and are refusing to call a percipient witness to the events in question simply makes no sense,” criminal defense attorney Will Korman said. “It makes no sense that Judge Kavanaugh isn’t screaming from the rooftops, ‘Get Mark Judge in here!’ If Mark Judge can corroborate his innocence, why isn’t Kavanaugh pleading, ‘For love of God, subpoena this guy. He’s going to back me up.’ ”
John Greaney, a former Supreme Judicial Court justice who has taught criminal and constitutional law at Suffolk University Law School, said, “It seems to me that it’s essential that he be there, put under oath, for him to say, ‘I don’t remember anything’ or ‘I wasn’t there.’ To say that and then go into hiding and say everybody’s got to accept that, that’s not the way it works on something like this. It just doesn’t happen that way.”
Jack Beermann, a professor of law at Boston University, said the entire hearing procedure yesterday was “odd.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this before in a Senate or any congressional hearing, and I haven’t heard any good explanation for why they didn’t have the FBI try to track down all the details before they held the hearing,” Beermann said.
Beermann also noted that giving a statement and speaking under oath are two very different things, since lying to a news outlet doesn’t carry any threat of imprisonment.