Brett Kavanaugh Is Long Past His Sell-by Date as a Credible Human

By William Boardman, Reader Supported News

02 October 18

I have been speaking with a number of people on the other side. We’ve had conversations ongoing for a while with regard to making sure that we do due diligence here….

– Senator Jeff Flake, Arizona Republican, September 28, 2018

hen Jeff Flake says he’s been talking with people on the other side about doing due diligence regarding the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court nomination, that’s the sound of hypocrisy talking. Flake’s party destroyed due diligence the moment it decided to keep most of the records of Kavanaugh’s government service secret. Think about that. It doesn’t seem the Democrats thought much about it. They made some token complaints before rolling over and saying, in effect, that’s OK, this guy worked for the executive branch on polarizing, partisan issues for years, but we don’t really need to know what he did even though taxpayers were paying him to do it. Seriously, whatever his involvement with Vince Foster’s suicide or the Starr investigation into Monica Lewinsky or shutting down the vote count in the 2000 election or building a bogus case for an illegal war in Iraq or developing justifications for torture and other war crimes, we don’t need to know about any of that. And so we don’t.

A bipartisan conspiracy of silence was treated as a reasonable approach to vetting a chronic liar whose known views would take this country in the opposite direction from where a majority of the people appear to want it to go. With that corrupt two-party bargain in place, the risk of an actual, factual record for the candidate was too great a risk to take. And then Dr. Christine Blasey Ford finally emerged with a credible tale of Kavanaugh and Mark Judge, both drunk and laughing hysterically, trying to rape her in an eerie enactment of a “devil’s triangle” (which Kavanaugh, with presumably unintended irony, would later testify falsely was a “drinking game” – a game for the drinkers, perhaps, but not so much the victim). This was one of the lesser dark areas of Kavanaugh’s case that persuaded Jeff Flake to play both sides of the aisle to no clear purpose (continuing his September 28 statement):

And I think it would be proper to delay the floor vote for up to, but not more than, one week in order to let the FBI continue—to do an investigation, limited in time and scope, to the current allegations that are there, and limited in time to no more than one week….

Acting as if he were proposing something brave, Flake suggested postponing the floor vote, not the committee vote, a gesture that is so antithetical to itself as to be a moral cypher. If there is reason to postpone the floor vote, then there is at least as much reason to postpone the committee. The committee vote by definition pre-judges the floor vote. The committee vote maintains the nomination’s momentum, even as Flake pretends to pause for reflection while the FBI investigates.

But his proposal isn’t a good faith postponement. Flake does not seek a serious, credible FBI investigation that follows the facts wherever they might lead. Acting in patent bad faith, he calls for an investigation of limited time and scope, conditions that increase the likelihood of an inadequate investigation. And Flake calls for an investigation limited “to the current allegations,” which is tantamount to calling for a cover-up of any future allegations, or any further allegations developing out of current allegations. Having called for a process that could appear as fairness without significant risk of actual fairness, Flake concluded his statement:

And I will vote to advance the bill to the floor with that understanding.

Flake’s fellow Republicans professed to be shocked – shocked! – by his resort to subterfuge while moving the Kavanaugh nomination forward. Then they promptly went along with it. As did the president, with a still secret order implementing it. Flake may have imagined himself as the subject of a profile in courage, even though his action accomplished nothing. It was a profile in cowardice cloaked in hypocrisy. Little wonder this plan has been unraveling almost since it was put in place. Actual courage would have led Flake to vote against sending the nomination to the floor of the Senate until all Kavanaugh’s dishonesties, anger issues, and judicial temperament questions had been satisfactorily answered. A relatively simple example, when Kavanaugh says in his opening statement under oath:

Dr. Ford’s allegation is not merely uncorroborated, it is refuted by the very people she says were there, including by a longtime friend of hers. Refuted. 

This is false. None of Dr. Ford’s allegations were refuted by anyone. Dr. Ford’s allegations have not been effectively rebutted by anyone. Kavanaugh has denied them. His supporters have said, in effect, I can’t imagine he’d do such a thing. But there is NO evidence that counters Dr. Ford’s allegations. And Kavanaugh knows that: right before claiming “refutation” Kavanaugh himself acknowledged that “the very people she says were there” have all said they don’t remember anything. Kavanaugh doesn’t mention that the “longtime friend” has said she believes Dr. Ford.

Why does this matter?

Any decent judge should know the difference between “refute” and “rebut,” and should take care not to assert refutation where none exists. If Kavanaugh is deliberately lying here, that should be disqualifying for service on the Supreme Court, or any court. If Kavanaugh is not lying, the dishonesty with which he presents and evaluates evidence should be disqualifying for his holding any judgeship.

Kavanaugh made a point of saying he wrote his own opening statement, with help from no one. He says he showed it to one former law clerk (who apparently had nothing to say about the misuse of “refute”). Kavanaugh insisted that it was all his own work, as was this passage:

This whole two-week effort has been a calculated and orchestrated political hit, fueled with apparent pent-up anger about President Trump and the 2016 election, fear that has been unfairly stoked about my judicial record, revenge on behalf of the Clintons and millions of dollars in money from outside left-wing opposition groups.

That’s a pretty remarkable charge for a sitting judge to make without offering any supporting evidence. The record suggests it’s not entirely true (at best), since Dr. Ford tried to come forward in July, when Kavanaugh first appeared on the short list of possible nominees. The fact that Dr. Ford’s name was not public until September 17 was not her doing, and nothing in the record supports the notion that these events were “a calculated and orchestrated political hit.” Kavanaugh’s statement here smacks of raw, right-wing partisanship based not on fact but bias.

We do not want any more judges acting on bias rather than facts. We should have the FBI investigate Kavanaugh’s fervent claims. We should begin by believing him. We should provide a public hearing in which he may put forward any factual basis for his claim that he is the victim of an attempted political rape by unnamed attackers.

William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.

Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.

Top Five Signs Kavanaugh Might Have Been a Mean, Black-Out Drunk Capable of Anything

By Juan Cole, Informed Comment

02 October 18

eorge W. Bush is supporting Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination. But Bush is more honest than the judge. He was asked by journalists during one of his campaigns if he had ever used cocaine. He made waves when he declined to answer the question. He later admitted that the reason he did not answer was that he had been a heavy drinker for years, and he couldn’t really know the answer: “The media won’t let go of these ridiculous cocaine rumors,” Scott McClellan heard Bush say. “You know, the truth is I honestly don’t remember whether I tried it or not. We had some pretty wild parties back in the day, and I just don’t remember.”

For obvious reasons, Kavanaugh could not reply that way to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, but likely he should have, if he were honest with himself and with us.

For several reasons, it matters whether Brett Kavanaugh was a stumbling drunk who drank himself into a stupor in high school and at Yale. The allegation, by the way, is not that he was an alcoholic necessarily, but that on weekends he and his friends engaged in binge drinking. Alcoholics will drink alone and on a Tuesday. Kavanaugh drank socially, you could almost say as a pack ritual. Kavanaugh could not have succeeded academically or done sports if he were an alcoholic. But Saturday nights anyone could get away with binge drinking and be sober enough on Monday to get back to work.

The first reason it matters is that he denied it under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee. If he was lying about it, he shouldn’t be on the bench.

The second reason it matters is that if he did drink to excess, it makes it more plausible that he occasionally did thinks while drunk that would be characteristic of a diminution of inhibitions. The story Deborah Ramirez tells about a drunk Kavanaugh exposing himself to her at a party and her having to push his penis away from her face is precisely the sort of thing that a binge-drunk young man might do.

I actually don’t think binge drinking can explain the incident alleged by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford at a high school house party. It seems clear that Kavanaugh and Mark Judge, if Blasey Ford is right, had set up an ambush for any girl who came up to use the bathroom, such that they could hustle her into the bedroom and get her down on the bed with their body weight above her. This tactic shows premeditation and careful planning, and it is highly unlikely to have been the sort of thing that happened only once. Girls at these parties were plied with liquor, in hopes that they wouldn’t be in a position to protest, or perhaps to remember what happened very well. There is something Cosby-like about the criminal arrangement Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh and Judge of arranging.

While establishing that Kavanaugh binge drank does not in and of itself prove that he engaged in sexual assault, it does impeach his testimony and lend credence to his accusers.

Here are five eye witness accounts, one a police document, that I am persuaded establish beyond doubt that Kavanaugh binge drank and was an aggressive, mean drunk and that he lost control of his inhibitions:

1. James Roche was Kavanaugh’s roommate in the Fall of 1983 at Yale. He issued a statement saying,

“I was Brett Kavanaugh’s roommate at Yale University in the Fall of 1983. We shared a two-bedroom unit in the basement of Lawrence Hall on the Old Campus. Despite our living conditions, Brett and I did not socialize beyond the first few days of freshman year. We talked at night as freshman roommates do and I would see him as he returned from nights out with his friends. It is from this experience that I concluded that although Brett was normally reserved, he was a notably heavy drinker, even by the standards of the time, and that he became aggressive and belligerent when he was very drunk. I did not observe the specific incident in question, but I do remember Brett frequently drinking excessively and becoming incoherently drunk.”

Roche is the CEO of Helix Re, a software company in San Francisco. He says he was friends with accuser Deborah Ramirez.

2, Lisa Miller at The Cut talked to a third person who was with Roche and Kavanaugh in a 3-bedroom complex at Lawrence Hall. Kit Winter says that Roche was not much of a drinker but that Kavanaugh and his frat friends drank so much that they made the shared bathroom impossible to use for all the vomit. Kavanaugh and his circle, who were “loud, obnoxious frat boy-like drunks” were constantly puking in it. Winter told Miller:

“There was a lot of vomit in the bathroom. No one ever cleaned it up. It was disgusting. It wasn’t incidental. It wasn’t, ‘Oh, this weekend someone puked in the bathroom.’ People were constantly puking in the bathroom. Constantly.”

Lori Adams, a friend of Winter’s at that time, told Miller she remembered the horror show of the bathroom.

3. The Week summarizes a CNN appearance by a Kavanaugh classmate at Yale. Lynn Brookes, a Republican who used to go drinking with Kavanaugh as an undergraduate at Yale, was so disturbed by Kavanaugh’s lies before the Senate Judiciary Committee that she went on CNN with Chris Cuomo to refute them. She said:

“I’ll tell you, Chris, I watched the whole hearing, and a number of my Yale colleagues and I were extremely disappointed in Brett Kavanaugh’s characterization of himself and the way that he evaded his excessive drinking question” and “was lying to the Senate Judiciary Committee today . . . There is no doubt in my mind that while at Yale, he was a big partier, often drank to excess, and there had to be a number of nights where he does not remember.”

She remembers him when he went to pledge at a fraternity as “stumbling drunk, in a ridiculous costume, saying really dumb things,” and is sure he doesn’t have a clear recollection of that night.

Brookes is unimpressed by Kavanaugh’s assertion that he couldn’t have been that heavy a drinker at Yale because he did well in classes and was an athlete. She points out, “I studied really hard, too . . . I went to Wharton business school, I did very well at Yale, I also drank to excess many nights with Brett Kavanaugh.”

The Week notes, “She recounted a party where Kavanaugh and Chris Dudley, one of his character witnesses, humiliated a female student by barging in on her in a compromising position.”

I am hoping the FBI will talk to Brookes and moreover I think we’d all like to know more about what this last sentence means, exactly.

4. Chad Ludington, one of Kavanaugh’s classmates and drinking buddies at Yale, has given an interview in which he said, “The fact is, at Yale, and I can speak to no other times, Brett was a frequent drinker, and a heavy drinker . . . I know, because, specially in our first two years of college, I often drank with him. On many occasions I heard Brett slur his words and saw him staggering from alcohol consumption, not all of which was beer. . . When Brett got drunk, he was often belligerent and aggressive.” Ludington is Teaching Associate Professor in the History Department at North Carolina State University and has a great deal of academic credibility to lose if he were to misstate the case. As it turns out, he told an anecdote about Kavanaugh brawling in a bar and it turns out that the NYC was able to unearth a police report:

5. At the Demery’s bar in New Haven in 1985, Kavanugh and his friend annoyed a patron by staring at him, thinking he might be a rock star, and he told them what to do with themselves. Kavanaugh is alleged to have thrown his beer in the man’s face and to have thrown ice on people. The incident generated a police visit and report in which Kavanaugh was questioned.

All these people are not lying. Some don’t even know one another. Some are Republicans. Kavanaugh lied to the Senate. That is perjury. And he cannot be sure of what he did or didn’t do.