The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
At rally, Trump urges his supporters to vote
WHEELING, W.VA. — President Donald Trump on Satur
turned his beleaguered Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh into a rallying cry for Republicans to vote in November, saying they can reject the “ruthless and outrageous tactics” he says Democrats used against the judge.
“We see this horrible, horrible, radical group of Democrats. You see what’s happening right now,” Trump said at a rally with thousands of supporters in West Virginia. Trump won the state in 2016 by 42 percentage points.
“And they’re determined to take back power by any means necessary. You see the meanness, the nastiness. They don’t care who they hurt, who they have to run over to get power,” he said.
“We’re not going to give it to them,” Trump said.
Kavanaugh, the federal appeals judge Trump nominated to the nation’s highest court, appeared headed for confirmation until Cali- fornia professor Christine Blasey Ford accused him of sexually assaulting her when they were teenagers in Maryland in the 1980s. Kavanaugh denied her accusations and those of two other women who since have accused him of sexual misconduct.
Ford initially made her claims in a confidential letter sent in July to Sen. Dianne Feinstein of California, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s top Democrat. But the letter was leaked after Kavanaugh’s initial confirmation hearing and Ford then told her explosive story to The Washington Post.
Feinstein denied being the source, but Trump has blamed her for the leak and he mocked her at the rally.
“The entire nation has witnessed the shameless conduct of the Democrat Party,” Trump said.
Feinstein responded to Trump on Twitter, saying she acted “consistent” with Ford’s wishes for privacy from the moment she received the professor’s letter.
“We kept her letter confidential and did not leak the contents or its existence to anyone,” she said.
Trump took a humorous jab at another Judiciary Committee Democrat, Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, the former Newark mayor considered a possible challenger in 2020. The president told the crowd that Booker ran Newark “into the ground” and asked: “Now he wants to be president?”
Trump issued a fresh defense of Kavanaugh, praising him as “one of the most accomplished legal minds of our time” and saying he had suffered “the meanness, the anger” of Democrats.
The president urged his supporters to go to the polls on Nov. 6, when control of Congress is at stake, to vote Republican and “reject the ruthless and outrageous tactics of the Democrat Party.”
Trump appeared in Wheeling a day after he ordered a new FBI investigation of Kavanaugh. Democrats and some Republicans had been asking for the new investigation, which will delay by at least a week a Senate vote on his confirmation.