SUPREME SMEAR
Another dishonest st attack against Brett Kavanaugh h
T HE Brett Kavanaugh lynch mob can’t let it go. Now Democrats want to impeach the conservative Supreme Court justice over a new sexual-misconduct allegation in The New York Times so shady, even the newspaper doesn’t seem to believe in it.
This fresh smear is buried in the 11th paragraph of a story written by Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, adapted from their upcoming book, “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh.”
They name their alleged witness to the alleged incident as Max Stier, a Washington lawyer and former Yale classmate of Kavanaugh’s, described as a “respected thought leader on federal government management,” but who also appears to be the same Max Stier who was on then-President Bill Clinton’s legal team during the Lewinsky scandal in 1998, when he worked at the law firm Williams & Connolly.
Stier allegedly claims that he “saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a . . . drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student” when Kavanaugh was a freshman at Yale.
The Times story claims Stier “notified senators and the FBI about this account but the FBI did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly. (We corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier.)”
What Pogrebin and Kelly left out of their story, yet reported in their book, is that the alleged victim doesn’t remember the incident and refuses to talk about it. That’s journalistic malpractice.
So no corroboration, no evidence, no victim and no witness (only hearsay of one), but the “paper of record” is perfectly fine with defaming Kavanaugh all over again.
By the way, in the book, the authors gratuitously name the woman, including a new surname she uses, even though she doesn’t want to talk — and the woman’s friends the reporters did speak to say she doesn’t remember anything. Why shame her? Because she refuses to back up the reporters’ agenda?
The Times reporters claim their fresh allegation about Kavanaugh “echoes” previously uncorroborated 35-yearold claims by another Yale classmate, Deborah Ramirez.
Yet Ramirez admitted to The New Yorker, which broke the story last year, that her memory was hazy because she had been drinking heavily during another dorm party at which Kavanaugh allegedly “thrust his penis in her face and caused her to touch it without her consent.”
She wasn’t even certain it was Kavanaugh when first contacted by the magazine but, after “six days of carefully assessing her memories,” lo and behold, she delivered.
There was never any evidence that what Ramirez said was true, and the Times reporters have not found any new corroboration of her story.
In fact, they quote another Yale classmate, Ken Appold, as saying that none of the people Ramirez claimed were in the room at the time of the alleged incident had any recollection of it. But that doesn’t stop the authors from insinuating an FBI coverup. In their book, they claim “Ramirez’s legal team gave the FBI a list of at least 25 individuals who may have had corroborating evidence.” The authors don’t name these potential witnesses but complain that the FBI failed to interview any of them. Did the reporters reach any of these people? It’s hard to believe that some, if not all, of the 25 were reached by thethe media in the scrum to destroy Kavanaugh. Yet there’s been not one direct witness to the Ramirez incident who has come forward. The Times’ story is a farrago of innuendo and guilt by word association, and it’s probably safe to assume the same of the book, which is published Tuesday. A surefire “tell” that the newspaper doesn’t back its own story is that it buried the bombshell allegation halfway down, on Page 2 of the Sunday Review section with the anodyne headline: “Brett Kavaugh Fit in. She Did Not.” There is no tracer to the story in the news pages. It just sits there, buried under piles of newsprint, like an un-unexploded little bomb for others to detonate.
Further evidence the newspaper didn’t take its own reporting seriously was a tweet, later deleted, that it used to promote the story on the official @nytopinion account, which tastelessly made light of the alleged incident: “Having a penis thrust in your face at a drunken dorm party may seem like harmless fun . . .”
If that’s the Times’ idea of “harmless fun,” it has a screw loose in its moral compass.
The conclusion you can draw from all this is that the Times didn’t back its own reporting.
Of course, that doesn’t matter to unscrupulous Democrats, who fell over themselves yesterday to press the red button for political advantage.
Kamala Harris, Julián Castro and Elizabeth Warren were first out of the blocks calling for Kavanaugh’s impeachment.
Despite their umbrage, the story provided no new credible allegation against Kavanaugh, nor did it make former allegations, such as Ramirez’s, any more credible. It’s just more “may remember” and “heard it from someone two weeks later” wrapped up in hyperbole aimed at one thing — trying to undermine a Supreme Court justice they don’t like.
It was a witch hunt then, it’s a witch hunt now.
New York Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly spent months reaching out to Yale alumni for more dirt on Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s undergraduate years more than three decades ago, and came up empty.
That’s the actual bottom line of their Times article that dropped online Saturday, though they suggest otherwise — since they clearly want to not just boost sales of the book, but also do whatever they can to further smear the justice.
How dishonest was the piece? Well, its biggest “shocker” is noting the existence of yet another alleged Kavanaugh incident — but the article leaves out the fact that the supposed victim doesn’t remember a thing.
For that matter, the guy who apparently made the accusation won’t talk about it: Their account of his memories is based on what other people say he said. Nor has anyone else corroborated the story — though the authors reached out on the Yale alum Facebook page and doggedly tried to track down anyone who might know anything.
The Times piece, and the book, also make a big deal about 25 possible witnesses to the incident sorta-kinda recalled by Deborah Ramirez, which The New Yorker and the
Times reported during the confirmation fight.
The FBI, the authors charge, never interviewed any of the 25 — though it’s not clear how they know that. In any case, several other witnesses have said they were at the party in question, and don’t recall what Ramirez does.
Again, no one has ever stood up to corroborate what Ramirez decided, after six days consulting with a lawyer, what she recalled about the decades-old incident. (Same for Christine Blasey Ford’s story, too, though the Times pair oh-so-helpfully say, “we found Dr. Ford’s allegations credible.”)
Whatever the FBI did or didn’t do, the authors (and other reporters working the same beat) did interview everyone who’d talk to them — and they haven’t found a scintilla of evidence to back up any of the tales.
Yet they still hype their smoke and vapors. Why?
Pogrebin and Kelly doubtless want to plug their book, and the Times is loyally trying to help.
But the larger motive here is plainly just to further blacken Kavanaugh’s name in service of a political agenda.
It’s shameless and disgusting.