White House denies limiting FBI’s probe of Kavanaugh
WASHINGTON — The White House is not “micromanaging” a new FBI review of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s background but is leaving it to senators who requested the probe to dictate the parameters of the investigation, advisers close to President Trump insisted Sunday.
Some Democratic lawmakers claim the White House is keeping investigators from interviewing certain witnesses and have questioned how thorough an investigation that must be concluded by Friday can and will be. Trump tweeted that no amount of time “will never be enough” for Democrats, most of whom oppose giving Kavanaugh, a federal appeals court judge, a seat on the nation’s highest court.
Meanwhile, FBI agents on Sunday interviewed Deborah Ramirez, one of three women accusing Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, according to a person familiar with the matter who requested anonymity.
Ramirez detailed her allegation that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at a party in the early 1980s when they were students at Yale University. Kavanaugh has denied Ramirez’s allegation.
But Christine Blasey Ford, the professor at Palo Alto University who says Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers, has not been contacted by the FBI since Trump on Friday ordered the agency to take another look at the nominee’s background, according to a member of Ford’s team.
Kavanaugh has denied assaulting Ford.
In a statement released Sunday, a Yale University classmate of Brett Kavanaugh’s said he is “deeply troubled by what has been a blatant mischaracterization by Brett himself of his drinking at Yale.” Charles “Chad” Ludington, who now teaches at North Carolina State University, said he was friend of Kavanaugh at Yale and that Kavanaugh was “a frequent drinker, and a heavy drinker.”
“On many occasions I heard Brett slur his words and saw him staggering from alcohol consumption, not all of which was beer. When Brett got drunk, he was often belligerent and aggressive,” Ludington said.
On the issue of the scope of the FBI’s investigation, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said White House counsel Don McGahn, who is managing Kavanaugh’s nomination, “has allowed the Senate to dictate what these terms look like, and what the scope of the investigation is.”
“The White House isn’t intervening. We’re not micromanaging this process. It’s a Senate process,” Sanders said on “Fox News Sunday.”
Senate Judiciary Committee member Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., requested an investigation last Friday — after he and other Republicans on the panel voted along strict party lines in favor of Kavanaugh’s confirmation — as a condition for his own subsequent vote to put Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court.
Another committee member, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., said Sunday that testimony would be taken from Ramirez and Kavanaugh’s high school friend Mark Judge, who has been named by two of three women accusing Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct.
“I think that will be the scope of it. And that should be the scope of it,” Graham said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, called on the White House and the FBI to provide the written directive regarding the investigation’s scope. In a letter Sunday, she also asked for updates on any expansion of the original directive.
Republicans control 51 seats in the closely divided 100member Senate and cannot afford to lose more than one vote on confirmation.