Kavanaugh: Was he spared a real investigation?
The FBI confirmed last week what many had suspected, said Dahlia Lithwick in Slate.com: The bureau’s review of sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh was a “sham investigation.” During his 2018 Supreme Court confirmation hearings, a former high school friend, Christine Blasey Ford, accused Kavanaugh of drunken sexual assault, and a former Yale classmate said he’d exposed his penis to her while drunk. The FBI agreed to create a “tip line,” but never said what came of those tips. Thanks to dogged inquiries from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), the FBI now concedes that it simply referred the most “relevant” of 4,500 tips received to President Trump’s White House counsel, Don McGahn— who helped pick Kavanaugh in the first place. It was all a smoke screen, to enable Republicans to claim Kavanaugh had been cleared by the FBI.
Liberals continue to try to “cast a cloud of suspicion” over Kavanaugh, said Jonathan Turley in TheHill.com, but they have “no concrete evidence” of any wrongdoing. Many of the tips were phoned in by wackos, according to a Senate Judiciary Committee lawyer, and every senator received a 1,000-plus-page summary of the tips.
Democrats are obviously trying to intimidate Kavanaugh, said John McCormack in NationalReview .com. The court will take up major cases on abortion and gun rights in its next term, and this story is a shot across Kavanaugh’s bow. At a pro-choice rally last year, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer cited Kavanaugh by name and shouted, “You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions!”
We may never know what a real investigation of Kavanaugh might have found, said Bess Levin in VanityFair.com. But let’s consider what we do know. In his hearings, Kavanaugh referred to his love of beer about 30 times; angrily shot back at a question about whether he got blackout drunk by asking, “Have you?”; and had upwards of $100,000 in credit-card debt that mysteriously disappeared. At the time, former President Trump stood by his embattled nominee, but recently said in an interview, “I saved his life. He wouldn’t even be in a law firm. Who would have had him? Nobody. Totally disgraced.” Instead, Kavanaugh has a lifetime appointment on the nation’s highest court and will wield enormous power over all Americans for decades to come.