Trump: 2nd accuser ‘has nothing’
President calls Democratic push to block Kavanaugh’s court confirmation ‘con job’
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump denounced Democratic efforts to block Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation as a cynical “con job” Tuesday and launched a dismissive attack on a second woman accusing the nominee of sexual misconduct in the 1980s, asserting she “has nothing.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell predicted that Kavanaugh would win approval, despite the new allegations and uncertainty about how pivotal Republicans would vote in a roll call now expected next week. Like much of America, lawmakers awaited a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Thursday in which Kavanaugh and chief accuser Christine Blasey Ford are to testify.
“I will be glued to the television,” said Sen. Susan Collins, a moderate Republican from Maine who has yet to declare her position on confirmation.
The committee scheduled its own vote on Kavanaugh for Friday, and Republican leaders laid plans that could keep the full Senate in session over the weekend and produce a final showdown roll call soon after — close to the Oct. 1 start of the high court’s new term.
Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, Republican chairman of the committee whose 11 GOP members are all male, said his panel was hiring a female attorney who would ask Ford his party’s questions on Thursday. He declined to name her.
“We’re doing it strictly to depoliticize the whole operation, to offer Dr. Ford the professional environment she asked for,” Grassley said of Ford, now a psychology professor in Northern California.
Democrats weren’t buying that.
“My gut is they’re trying to avoid a panel of all white guys asking tone-deaf questions,” said Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware.
The Washington Post reported Thursday that Arizona prosecutor Rachel Mitchell has emerged as the GOP’s top choice to question Ford and Kavanaugh, according to two people familiar with the decision. They spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Mitchell, a registered Republican, is the sex crimes bureau chief for the Maricopa County Attorney's Office in Phoenix. She has worked for the office for 26 years.
Hanging in the balance in the confirmation fight is Trump’s chance to swing the high court more to the right for a generation. Despite McConnell’s forecast, Kavanaugh’s fate remains uncertain in a chamber where Republicans have a 51-49 majority.
While a few Republicans have also challenged the credibility of Kavanaugh’s accusers, Trump’s words have been more biting. Last week, he lampooned Ford’s allegation that an inebriated Kavanaugh trapped her be- Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell believes Brett Kavanaugh will win confirmation despite the new allegations. Collins Murkowski neath him on a bed at a high school house party and tried to take her clothes off before she escaped. Surely she would have reported it to police if the encounter was “as bad as she says,” the president said.
“It’s a con game they’re playing,” he said Tuesday. “They’re really con artists. They don’t believe it themselves, OK?”
Trump’s latest broadside against a Kavanaugh accuser was aimed at Deborah Ramirez, who told The New Yorker magazine that Kavanaugh caused her to touch his penis at a party when both were Yale freshmen. Ramirez conceded she’d been drinking, too, and was uncertain of some details of the alleged incident.
“The second accuser has nothing,” Trump told reporters at the United Nations. “The second accuser doesn’t even know— thinks maybe it was him, maybe not. She admits she was drunk. She admits time lapses.”
Predictably, that played badly with Democrats.
“How many women have heard that before? How many women have kept their experiences quiet because they knew they would hear that?” Sen. Patty Murray of Washington state said of Trump’s characterization.
She said Trump’s remarks were “disgusting.” She herself was carried to Washington on a 1992 wave of fervor by female voters, a year after the Senate discounted sexual harassment allegations against Clarence Thomas and sent him to the Supreme Court.
Republicans also are concerned that, win or lose, the battle is further animating women already inclined to vote against Trump’s party in November’s elections in which control of the next Congress is at stake.
Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, a key Republican vote, said GOP senators need to come into the hearing with open minds.
“It’s very important to take allegations of those who come forward seriously, and I think we need to go into this hearing with the view that we will listen,” she said.
On Tuesday, the Republicans were assessing what Kavanaugh’s television interview on the Fox News Channel on Monday — an unusual appearance for a Supreme Court nominee — augured about how he would do in Thursday’s hearing.
Some in the White House expressed relief that Kavanaugh presented a positive image to counter the allegations. Yet he appeared shaky at times. And there remained concern among aides and Trump himself about how Kavanaugh would hold up facing far fiercer questioning from Senate Democrats, according to a White House official not authorized to speak publicly.
The No. 2 Senate Republican, John Cornyn of Texas, said he thought Kavanaugh “did well and did what he needed to do” in the interview.