Trump defends Supreme Court pick, but may change his mind

WASHINGTON: US President Donald Trump praised his Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh, but said he would be open to withdrawing his nomination if he finds testimony about sexual assault allegations against him to be credible.

“I can always be convinced,” Trump said yesterday, on the eve of a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing featuring one of Kavanaugh’s accusers.

“If I thought he was guilty of something like this, yes, sure,” Trump said at a press conference on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

“It’s possible I’ll hear that and I’ll say, ‘Hey, I’m changing my mind.’ I want to watch,” Trump said ahead of the hearing featuring Christine Blasey Ford, a university professor who has accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her when they were teenagers.

In prepared testimony released on Wednesday, Blasey Ford, 51, said she feared that Kavanaugh would rape her during the attack, which she said occurred in 1982.

She said the incident left her “drastically altered”, but that it was her “civic duty” to tell lawmakers what happened.

Kavanaugh, 53, has also been accused of

I can always be convinced. Donald Trump

exposing himself to a classmate, Deborah Ramirez, during an alcoholfuelled Yale University party a few years later.

On Wednesday, a third woman came forward with explosive allegations, saying she witnessed sexually abusive behaviour by Kavanaugh when he was a teenager.

Trump described Kavanaugh as a “great gentleman” and a “great intellect”, and said he believed the accusations against the conservative judge were “false”.

Trump said he was sceptical as he personally had been the target of “false statements” in the past made by various women.

“I’ve had a lot of false charges made against me,” he said. “People want fame, they want money, they want whatever.”

He also accused his Democratic opponents of being “con artists” and destroying Kavanaugh’s reputation.