A High-End Legal Ratf*cker Is Still a Ratf*cker

By Charles Pierce, Esquire

03 October 10

Brett Kavanaugh's record is clear.

enate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had himself a high-dudgeon shit-fit on Tuesday as he opened the Senate for business. His topic, unsurprisingly, was the fact that Brett Kavanaugh, the Yalie who put the bull in Bulldog, is not yet ensconced for life in a comfy chair in the Supreme Court. Mitch has been having these low-volume high-sterics every day for a week now, since Jeff Flake threw McConnell's well-designed railroad off the tracks last Friday.

Now, with the seven days McConnell promised for a renewed investigation running out, Mitch is stoking up the boilers to get a running start on Friday.

"The floodgates of mud and muck opened entirely on Brett Kavanaugh and his family. Out of the woodwork came one uncorroborated allegation after another, each seemingly more outlandish than the last...This is not politics as usual."

Merrick Garland, Mitch.

So here's my thing. I believe most of what has been alleged about Brett Kavanaugh from the people who knew him back in the day. His demeanor before the committee last week made him look like every privileged lace-curtain Irish inebriate with whom I grew up. I believe everything Dr. Christine Blasey Ford said about him, not because I oppose his nomination, but because she was human and he was a wind-up rage doll. Those charges and that temperament are enough to keep him off the Supreme Court. Hell, they're enough to keep him out from behind the counter at Costco.

But, even if these most recent charges never emerged, I want him kept off the Supreme Court, even though his attitude last week is a damned good reason. (And, as The Washington Post reported, it was what gave the American Bar Association pause regarding Kavanaugh's demeanor during the judge's first go-round in the Senate.) I want him kept off the Supreme Court because, up until C-Plus Augustus rammed him onto the bench in 2006, Kavanaugh's career was not that of a lawyer, but that of a partisan ratfcker. If he gets confirmed, we will have a vengeful partisan ratfcker on the Supreme Court for the rest of my lifetime, and that's not a legacy I want to leave behind.

Of all the things about which he has hedged and fudged and prevaricated, his services to conservative ratfcking exercises—from the Great Penis Hunt of the 1990s, to the brawl over little Elian Gonzalez, to the 2000 presidential burglary, to his activities on behalf of the Avignon Presidency—are the most consequential of his many misleading fairy tales, sleight-of-hand alibis, and outright lies.

Let us examine, for a moment, the case of Manuel Miranda.

In 2002 and 2003, when Kavanaugh was working in the White House counsel's office, nearly 5,000 documents were hacked and stolen from the computer files of the Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee. At the center of this scandal was Manuel Miranda, the Republican counsel to the committee who later was forced to resign behind the scandal. The stolen material related to what the Democratic senators were likely to ask prospective nominees put up by the Bush administration. At the time, Kavanaugh's role at the White House involved prepping nominees for their appearances before the committee. During Kavanaugh's confirmation hearings for the job he now holds, he was asked over 100 times about this affair and he replied that he'd received nothing from the thieves and that he never suspected that anything "untoward" was going on. He really said, "untoward."

Some say coincidence. I'm not sure. Neither is Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, who was on the Judiciary Committee back then and is still on it today. During Kavanaugh's first set of hearings before the committee, Leahy pointedly tried to pin Kavanaugh down on whether or not he had received and/or acted upon the material purloined by Miranda and his staff. This was because emails obtained by the current Senate Judiciary made a hash of everything Kavanaugh had said to the previous Judiciary Committee. As Leahy wrote subsequently in The Washington Post:

That includes eight pages from a Democratic memo, taken verbatim from me, on a controversial nominee that Kavanaugh was asked to not forward. Emails also show that Miranda told Kavanaugh about a sensitive, private letter that I received on a nominee’s position on abortion — a letter Miranda described as “confidential,” requesting that “no action be taken.” They also show Miranda asked to meet privately at his home to give Kavanaugh “paper” on Democratic senators’ thinking.

Kavanaugh could have said, of course, I got this material. I was a political operative in a White House that was trying its damndest to get its judges confirmed. But since he seems completely and rigidly incapable of believing himself capable of doing anything "untoward," we got another easily disprovable categorical statement.

Last week, when confronted with these emails, Kavanaugh testified that this was normal information shared with “friends across the aisle.” As I told Kavanaugh then, I was born at night, but not last night. I have served in the Senate for 44 years, including 20 years as the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee. It has never been normal to obtain sensitive, inside information from the opposing party, conveyed in secret and in real time involving the most contentious issues before our committee. A smart political operative on the frontlines of these battles would have seen these glaring red lights for what they were: clear evidence of nefarious acts.

And that’s not all. In 2004, Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) asked about Kavanaugh’s role in vetting U.S Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit nominee William Pryor. Pryor had called Roe v. Wade a constitutional “abomination” and argued that a right to same-sex intimacy would “logically extend” to “necrophilia, bestiality, and pedophilia.” Kavanaugh distanced himself from Pryor. He denied any part in vetting him, testifying that it was “not one that [he] worked on personally.” Yet emails suggest that Kavanaugh not only recommended Pryor for the seat, he also participated in a working group on the nomination, talked to a reporter about him and appears to have interviewed him.

There are similar concerns that Kavanaugh misled the Senate about his work on other controversial nominations, including William Haynes, who helped develop immoral George W. Bush-era interrogation policies, and Charles Pickering, who reduced the sentence of a man who burned a cross in front of an interracial couple’s house. Kavanaugh might have also misled the Senate by denying any involvement with detainee policies or any knowledge of documents related to a warrantless surveillance program.

This is the thing about ratfckers. The truth is always pliable. Even in categorical statements, it's pliable. The point of ratfcking is to win. This was true when Donald Segretti and all those GOP frat brothers at USC invented the marvelously descriptive term to describe how they messed with student elections in their college days—which, by Kavanaugh standards, of course, doesn't count because certainly what Segretti did in college had no bearing on his career as a lawyer in later life.

That's another thing. Brett Kavanaugh is a lawyer only because he went to law school and passed the bar. He's never tried a case, at least to my knowledge and, until he became a judge, he put his legal training at the service of high-end ratfcking, keeping the activities at least within sight of the traditional guard rails that stand between lawyers and 5-15 at Allenwood. Segretti was a lawyer. So was Gordon Liddy, who put Chapin to work. At least Liddy worked as a lawyer, being the prosecutor who busted Timothy Leary. (Of course, Liddy also once fired a revolver at the ceiling of a courtroom during his summation, so there's that.) Kavanaugh's only experience as a prosecutor was as a drooling operative in Ken Starr's little shop of sanctified presidential porn—which was, in many ways, one of the great ratfcking operations of all time, and certainly the most expensive.

(The latest bit of whitewash is the contention that Starr's shop reopened the investigation into Vince Foster's suicide so that Kavanaugh could put that particularly indecent fantasy to rest. Byron York is very big on this notion. While Kavanaugh ultimately concluded that Foster had indeed shot himself to death, the notion that he'd set out to conclude that—or to lay to rest the endless rightwing conspiracy ratfcking that attended the sad event—ignores some salient facts, most notably that Kavanaugh came to a conclusion at which two previous investigations already had arrived. There was no reason to investigate it again just because some Arkansas Project fantasists were using it as a prop. This was an attempt to see if the conspiracy theories contained enough truth to be weaponized in the pursuit of Bill Clinton.)

In short, there is a fine living to be made as a partisan lawyer specializing in high-end political ratfcking. It's an industry now. But a partisan ratfcking lawyer should not be able to hedge, and fudge, and prevaricate his way onto the Supreme Court. I'm also worried that he might chuck some water at counsel during oral arguments, but I'm putting that concern on, well, ice for a while.