White House Confirms FBI's Kavanaugh Investigation Only Looked at What Republican Senators Wanted

By Josh Israel, ThinkProgress

04 October 18

Raj Shah says it's irrelevant whether Trump's Supreme Court pick had memory lapses since he admitted he likes beer.

he White House announced early Thursday morning that the FBI has completed its “supplemental background investigation” into Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump’s pick for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. And later that morning, Principal Deputy Press Secretary Raj Shah told CNN that the investigation included just nine comprehensive interviews and no examination into whether the nominee may have lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee when he denied ever getting so drunk that he blacked out and had memory lapses.

Shah claimed that the White House had simply had the FBI investigate what the Senate was “interested in,” but then clarified that by that he only meant Senate Republicans.

Asked why the FBI was not permitted to investigate whether Kavanaugh had memory lapses — as his former Yale roommate and other former classmates have alleged — Shah argued that no Senator who matters wanted to know.

“All the folks that are demanding this type of investigation in the Senate are Democrats who have already pledged to vote no. They don’t want additional information to make a decision. They want to delay this process.”

Raj also argued that the multiple allegations of memory lapses are unimportant because Kavanaugh testified in last week’s hearing that he liked alcohol.

“A lot of people are coming forward about claims about his high school and college drinking which the Senate hasn’t asked us about, but also more importantly, he has already admitted in his testimony that he drank in high school, drank in college, sometimes drank too much, drank underage. He said he likes beer. I don’t really know what folks who are demanding an open-ended fishing expedition into those areas want other than delay, delay, delay.”

The Trump administration claimed earlier in the week that it had urged the Bureau to talk to anyone necessary to investigate the allegations made by at least three women that an intoxicated Kavanaugh had engaged in sexual predation in high school and college. But dozens of potential sources were not contacted or were ignored when they offered to testify and the investigators did not even talk to Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the Supreme Court nominee once tried to rape her.