‘Look at me’: Flake shifts after pair rips him on Kavanaugh
WASHINGTON >> Moments after pivotal Sen. Jeff Flake announced he would vote to confirm Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, the Arizona Republican was confronted with the consequences.
Two tearful women cornered Flake as he got on an elevator Friday, pleading for him to reconsider his support for the appeals court judge who’s been accused of sexual assault when he was a teenager. By the end of the day, Flake had, adding a condition to his promise to vote for Kavanaugh. He’d do so, Flake said, if the vote was delayed a week so the FBI could investigate “credible allegations” against the nominee.
It wasn’t clear that the raw, emotional elevator exchange changed Flake’s his mind by itself. But it’s hard to forget. And Flake didn’t deny it was one of the factors that made an impression.
“Look at me and tell me that it doesn’t matter what happened to me,” said 23-year-old Maria Gallagher.
Ana Maria Archila pointed her finger at Flake
while she appeared to keep the elevator door from closing.
“On Monday, I stood in front of your office,” Archila, co-executive director of the nonprofit Center for Popular Democracy Action, told Flake. “I told the story of my sexual assault. I told it because I recognized in Dr. Ford’s story that she is telling the truth. What you are doing is allowing someone who actually violated a woman to sit on the Supreme Court.”
Flake said he had to go to a hearing.
He was returning to the committee room where he and 20 colleagues had heard hours of testimony Thursday from Christine Blasey Ford, a California psychology professor who told them Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her decades ago. Kavanaugh strongly denied the allegation.
Flake had lobbied Republican leaders to give Ford the chance to speak. He was viewed as a possible “no” vote on the panel and in the closely-divided Senate — until his morning announcement Friday.