The New Brett Kavanaugh Revelations Prove the Original FBI Investigation Was a Sham
In case there was any lingering doubt that the FBI “investigation” that preceded Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court was a total sham, a new book—The Education of Brett Kavanaugh by New York Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly—provides more proof. According to early excerpts, the book corroborates the previously glossed-over account from Kavanaugh’s Yale classmate Deborah Ramirez and surfaces a new allegation of sexual misconduct—one which the FBI reportedly was notified of but did not investigate. The revelations—many from an adapted excerpt that was published over the weekend in the Times—have prompted at least six Democratic presidential candidates, including Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Julián Castro, to call for Kavanaugh’s impeachment.
“I sat through those hearings,” Harris wrote on Twitter. “Brett Kavanaugh lied to the U.S. Senate and most importantly to the American people. He was put on the court through a sham process, and his place on the court is an insult to the pursuit of truth and justice. He must be impeached.”
To recap the bleak moment in American history: Last September, on the cusp of the Senate Judiciary Committee sending Kavanaugh’s nomination to the full Senate floor, then senator Jeff Flake delayed the vote, striking a deal with Democratic senators and calling for an FBI investigation into the multiple accusations against Kavanaugh, including those from Christine Blasey Ford and Ramirez, who alleged that Kavanaugh pulled his pants down and thrust his penis at her during a drunken Yale party.
Alas, this was but a show of political theater because the investigation was doomed from the outset in both time and scope: The Senate gave the FBI just one week and a limited list of approved witnesses that didn’t even include Ford herself. The New Yorker reported that high school and college classmates attempting to contact the FBI to corroborate Ford and Ramirez’s accounts received no response. Ramirez’s story was largely glossed over—unlike Ford she was never even called to testify.
“Ramirez’s legal team gave the FBI a list of at least 25 individuals who may have had corroborating evidence,” The Education of Brett Kavanaugh reveals. “But the bureau—in its supplemental background investigation—interviewed none of them.” And yet Judiciary Committee chairman Senator Chuck Grassley outright dismissed the allegations of both Ford and Ramirez, finding “no corroboration.” The “investigation,” predictably, found no evidence of wrongdoing by Kavanaugh.
But while the GOP-controlled Senate couldn’t be bothered to allow a thorough investigation before confirming Kavanaugh to a lifetime on the high court, Pogrebin and Kelly attempted to. For one, they corroborate Ramirez’s story. “During his Senate testimony, Mr. Kavanaugh said that if the incident Ms. Ramirez described had occurred, it would have been ‘the talk of campus.’ Our reporting suggests that it was,” the authors write. “At least seven people, including Ms. Ramirez’s mother, heard about the Yale incident long before Mr. Kavanaugh was a federal judge. Two of those people were classmates who learned of it just days after the party occurred, suggesting that it was discussed among students at the time.”
The authors also reveal a new allegation of misconduct—similar to Ramirez’s—from Kavanaugh’s time at Yale: “A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student. Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the FBI about this account, but the FBI did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly. We corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier; the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say she does not recall the episode.”
That this allegation too was ignored—are we sensing a pattern?—was confirmed on Monday by the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, who tweeted: “Sen. Chris Coons personally alerted FBI Director Chris Wray of an additional eyewitness alleging Kavanaugh exposed himself to a 2nd woman at Yale—but the FBI never interviewed the witness, Max Stier, or investigated it.”
Kavanaugh has denied both Ford and Ramirez’s allegations and declined to answer the Times authors’ questions about Stier’s account (“Mr. Kavanaugh did not speak to us because we could not agree on terms for an interview,” Pogrebin and Kelly wrote.) President Trump is, as ever, tweeting, suggesting that Kavanaugh is the real victim.
Calls for Kavanaugh’s impeachment continue to come from the Democratic presidential hopefuls: “Brett Kavanaugh, Senate Republicans, and the Trump administration knew about corroborating witnesses and additional allegations of his sexual abuse and kept them quiet,” Castro tweeted. “We know he lied under oath,” Beto O’Rourke [said].(https://twitter.com/BetoORourke/status/1173311095416639488) “He should be impeached.” But many people are noting that the process for impeaching a Supreme Court justice is just as difficult as removing a president. The bar is, in fact, the same: A majority of the House must approve an indictment to impeach, and a two-thirds supermajority of the Senate must vote in favor of convicting the justice—a tough sell in the still Republican-led governing body that elevated Kavanaugh in the first place (if only by a narrow 50–48 margin).
Still the Democratic calls for impeachment matter in theory, even if they won’t be implemented in practice, much for the same reason the calls for Trump’s impeachment do: They speak truth to power and remind the public, in the midst of this backward, bizarro administration, of what fairness should look like. “Confirmation is not exoneration, and these newest revelations are disturbing,” Elizabeth Warren said on Twitter. “Like the man who appointed him, Kavanaugh should be impeached.”
Originally Appeared on Vogue
