Here Are Five Questions the FBI Should Ask Mark Judge About Brett Kavanaugh

By Peter Maass and Akela Lacy, The Intercept

29 September 18

lawyer for Mark Judge has said Judge will talk with agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation who are reopening a background check of Brett Kavanaugh — so the question of the moment is, what information can the FBI get out of him?

Judge is in a position to know pretty much everything there is to know about whether — and how and when — Kavanaugh sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford in the summer of 1982. Ford has accused Kavanaugh of drunkenly trying to tear off her clothes while groping her and covering her mouth to stifle her screams during a house party in the Maryland suburbs. She has testified that Judge was also in the locked bedroom, watching and laughing as Kavanaugh attacked her. She was 15 years old at the time, and Kavanaugh and Judge were two years older.

Several other sexual assault accusations have been leveled against the Supreme Court nominee, including an account from a woman who was a student at Yale with him and told the New Yorker that Kavanaugh drunkenly exposed himself to her and forced her to touch his penis without her consent during their freshman year. But the accusation from Ford was the centerpiece of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s extraordinary hearing on Thursday, when both Ford and Kavanaugh gave their accounts (Kavanaugh strongly denied assaulting Ford or anyone). It seems likely that the FBI will focus on Ford’s story in the coming week.

That’s why Judge is so crucial — he was allegedly there. He was a close friend of Kavanaugh’s during their years together at Georgetown Preparatory School, and in a 1997 memoir of those times, Judge wrote extensively about blackout drinking, house parties and aggressive sexual contact with girls from other schools (Georgetown Prep is an all-boys Catholic school). Judge has stated in two letters to the Senate committee that he does not recall an event of the sort that Ford has described, but that is hardly the end of the story, as far as the FBI should be concerned.

Here are some of the questions the FBI should ask him.

Did you see Brett Kavanaugh assault Christine Blasey Ford?

This is an obvious question, and Judge has already provided an answer of sorts — that he can’t recall anything. In his second letter to the committee, submitted after Ford testified on Thursday, Judge wrote to the senators, “I do not recall the events described by Dr. Ford in her testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee today. I never saw Brett act in the manner Dr. Ford describes.”

Judge wrote about his blackout drinking in his memoir, so his lack of recall, if that’s what it really is, does not mean everything. In the memoir, “Wasted: Tales of a GenX Drunk,” Judge acknowledged that “for years I did little else but drink, and slowly my brain and body deteriorated.” He recalled that on one occasion, waking up after a night of heavy drinking that he couldn’t remember, “I started to panic, terrified of what I could have done during the blackout. I could have done anything and not know it — I could have murdered somebody.”

So the obvious question is just the beginning of things.

Where were you on the night of July 1, 1982?

This has emerged as an unexpectedly key question. Earlier this month, Kavanaugh released copies of his calendars from the summer of 1982, to show that he was away for much of the time and did not have a lot of nights on which he might have attended a gathering of the sort described by Ford. But a slightly offhand remark by Ford has turned the calendars from exculpatory to potentially incriminating.

The date of the assault is a matter of controversy. The fact that Ford hasn’t been able to pinpoint it — she has said it was sometime in the summer of 1982 — has given weight to suggestions that her memory is unreliable or the attack didn’t happen. But in her testimony to the Senate, Ford mentioned that about six to eight weeks after the assault, she ran into Judge at the Potomac Village Safeway where he was working. “I could be more helpful to everyone if I knew the date [Mark Judge] worked at the Safeway,” she said.

As it happens, Judge wrote in his book that in the summer of 1982 he worked for a few weeks at a supermarket, to earn money for football camp. Camp started on August 22, according to Kavanaugh’s calendar. That would put Judge’s supermarket work in early to mid-August. As it turns out, there’s an entry on Kavanaugh’s calendar for July 1 — about six weeks before Ford saw Judge in the Safeway — in which Kavanaugh noted an outing with several of his male friends. “Go to Timmy’s for skis w/ Judge, Tom, PJ, Bernie, Squi,” it says. Kavanaugh said in his testimony that “skis” was short for brewskis — beer — and he gave the full names for that evening’s participants.

Ford has testified that at the small party where she was assaulted, four boys were present — “Brett Kavanaugh, Mark Judge, a boy named P.J., and one other boy whose name I cannot recall.” The July 1 entry on Kavanaugh’s calendar shows that he intended to go out with Judge, PJ (whose full name is Patrick J. Smyth), and two others. That largely overlaps with Ford’s description of who was present during the assault.

At the dramatic Judiciary Committee meeting on Friday, during which the divided committee voted to send Kavanaugh’s nomination to the floor of the House, albeit with the demand, from Republican Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, that the FBI reopen its background check, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., held up a blowup of the calendar and asked a key question. “This may, may be powerful corroborating evidence that the assault happened, that it happened that day, and that it happened in that place,” Whitehouse said. “But with no FBI investigation, we can’t tell.”

As it happens, July 1 was a Thursday, the start of a long weekend for Independence Day. Both Kavanaugh and Judge’s pages in their 1983 yearbook reference surviving July 4. The year wasn’t specified, but 1982 would have been the most recent one. It would appear that the long weekend of July 1-4, 1982, was remarkable for them. That’s why the FBI might well want to ask Judge what happened during this weekend.

When Brett Kavanaugh drank a lot, did he lose control?

Kavanaugh has insisted that he has never blacked out or passed out from drinking, and that he never engaged in inappropriate behavior with girls. But if the accusations against him are to be believed — and there are several — he displayed a pattern in his youth of inebriated and wrong conduct. Judge would know if there was such a pattern.

Nearly the entirety of Judge’s book is about excessive drinking with his adolescent buddies. There is no mention of Brett Kavanaugh in the book — Judge did not use real names — but there is a passage where a “Bart O’Kavanaugh” is described as passing out in the back of a car after vomiting from drinking too much. (Kavanaugh, asked at the hearing whether this was him, said the question should be directed to Judge.) Kavanaugh acknowledged that he was friendly with Judge in high school, and their yearbook pages indicate no shortage of familiarity, containing several shoutouts to each other — for instance, they both mention “100 kegs,” which Judge described, in his book, as an annual beer drinking target.

Judge wrote of a constant mixing with girls from nearby private schools at alcohol-laden parties. He described their “beach week” getaways at the end of the school year as a “week-long bacchanalia of drinking and sex, or at least attempts at sex.” It was during a beach week in the summer of 1981 that he referenced the passed-out “Bart O’Kavanaugh.” Judged added in the book, “Most of the time, everyone, including the girls, was drunk. If you could breathe and walk at the same time, you could hook up with someone. This did not mean going all the way — for the most part, these girls held to the beliefs of their very conservative families but after a year spent in school without girls, heavy petting was a virtual orgy.” He also described, in another passage, how he threw a party at his house when his parents were away and found, after nearly everyone had left, a drunken girl sobbing in an upstairs bathroom behind a locked door.

One of the accusations against Kavanaugh — when he was a freshman at Yale — represents a criminal extension of the kind of partying and behavior that Judge wrote about during their high school years. According to the New Yorker, a woman named Deborah Ramirez told Senate investigators that during their freshman year, at a party in their dormitory, Kavanaugh “had exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party, thrust his penis in her face, and caused her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away.” Ramirez told the New Yorker that she was “embarrassed and ashamed and humiliated.” The magazine reported that she remembered Kavanaugh’s behavior as the episode came to an end. “Brett was laughing,” she said. “I can still see his face, and his hips coming forward, like when you pull up your pants.”

What does ‘boofed’ mean?

This sounds like a ridiculous question, but it’s not entirely. On their yearbook pages, Kavanaugh and Judge asked whether the other had, as they put it, “boofed.” There has been a lot of discussion about what this might mean, with suggestions that it might not be an activity that would be flattering for a prospective Supreme Court justice to have engaged in, even in his teenage years. The New Yorker has asked, for instance, whether it might refer to “the practice of anally ingesting alcohol or drugs.” There have been other suggestions. In the hearing on Thursday, Kavanaugh said “boofed” was a reference to farting. “If we want to talk about flatulence at age 16 on a yearbook page, I’m game,” he said, disapprovingly.

There has been a lot of skepticism over whether Kavanaugh was telling the truth about this. As Vox put it, “He says ‘boofing’ is about farting and ‘Devil’s Triangle’ is a drinking game. Many people don’t believe him.” Ordinarily, it wouldn’t be a big deal if someone fibbed in a job interview about embarrassing entries in their high school yearbook. But Kavanaugh was testifying under oath, and he is seeking a job that is extraordinary — and that ordinarily requires a high degree of public faith that the holder’s honesty can be trusted on matters small and large. Even about boofing. What’s truly perverse here is that Kavanaugh could be undone not by the allegation that he tried to rape a 15-year old girl, but that he lied about idiotic things on his yearbook page.

Did you know Christine Blasey Ford? Did Kavanaugh?

Ford has consistently said she knew Kavanaugh, though not well. “In my freshman and sophomore school years, when I was 14 and 15 years old, my group of friends intersected with Brett and his friends for a short period of time,” she told the committee on Thursday. “I had been friendly with a classmate of Brett’s for a short time during my freshman year, and it was through that connection that I attended a number of parties that Brett also attended. We did not know each other well, but I knew him and he knew me.”

Kavanaugh has sidestepped a direct response to this. In an interview with Fox News last week, he stated, “I may have met her, we did not travel in the same social circle, she was not a friend, not someone I knew.”

But Ford’s version of events was bolstered at the hearing on Thursday when she was asked how she knew Kavanaugh. She mentioned that a boy she went out with for a few months was a friend of Kavanaugh’s. She was reluctant to give his name, not wanting to draw more public scrutiny to him, but the identifying information she provided made clear that she was referring to Chris Garrett, a friend of Kavanaugh’s who went by the nickname “Squi.” Kavanaugh and Garrett were on the football team together, and there are 13 references to Garrett (as “Squi”) on Kavanaugh’s calendars.

Judge was also on the football team, and his name appears on Kavanaugh’s calendar next to Squi’s on several occasions, so Judge knew Squi too, probably quite well. This means that Judge would potentially be in a position to confirm Ford’s account that she indeed socialized with Kavanaugh.

The Ford-Kavanaugh Hearings Were a Case Study in GOP Misogyny

By Frank Rich, New York Magazine

29 September 18

ost weeks, New York Magazine writer-at-large Frank Rich speaks with contributor Alex Carp about the biggest stories in politics and culture. Today, the Senate testimony of Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh.

Going into the Brett Kavanaugh hearing, critics questioned the choice of Republicans to cede many of their questions to Rachel Mitchell, a veteran sex crimes prosecutor. Was the hearing fair?

The hearing was a travesty, at once tragic, corrupt, and hateful.

The decision of the 11 Republican men on the committee to delegate their questioning to a prosecutor Mitch McConnell called a “female assistant” wasn’t even the most outrageous aspect of the proceedings. It says much about the hearing as a whole that while Mitchell did the men’s dirty work — failing to pursue any evidence that might corroborate Christine Blasey Ford’s narrative (e.g., a conspicuous entry in Kavanaugh’s Summer of ’82 calendar) — she too was in the end was belittled for the failing of being a woman. Banished to her seat at the children’s table soon after Kavanaugh started to testify, she sat in humiliated silence while Lindsey Graham and his bros took over the questioning to beat up on Ford in absentia once her testimony had ended.

The ways in which this shitshow was not fair are many. A fair hearing would have called witnesses, and not just Mark Judge, to testify under oath about the incidents ostensibly being adjudicated, so that their unvetted public statements could be subject to cross-examination. A fair hearing would not have subjected a sexual-assault victim to a sex-crimes prosecutor while shielding the accused from equal scrutiny. A fair hearing would not have allowed men, from the doddering, filibustering chairman Chuck Grassley to Kavanaugh himself, to interrupt, condescend to, and talk over the questioners, particularly women on the committee. A fair hearing might also have been abetted by a coordinated line of inquiry from the Democrats, who often repeated each other’s questions (netting the identical answers) instead of collaborating on a comprehensive strategy that would advance the unraveling of Kavanaugh’s dishonest defense. Indeed, the Democratic men would have been well advised — as some had suggested — to turn over most of the questioning to Amy Klobuchar and Kamala Harris, experienced prosecutors who in their allotted five minutes each drew blood and forced Kavanaugh to bare his teeth in contempt of their gender. But alas, Democratic men will also be men. Each needed his moment center stage. So instances of Kavanaugh’s lying, including those not directly related to Ford’s testimony, both in real time and in the past, went largely unmentioned and unaddressed. The Democrats also failed to debunk Kavanaugh’s repeated misrepresentation that Ford’s friend Leland Keyser had rebutted her account of what happened that summer night in 1982.

Jill Abramson, the co-author (with Jane Mayer) of Strange Justice, the definitive account of the Clarence Thomas–Anita Hill debacle, had it right when she wrote on the eve of this hearing that it had a “predetermined outcome.” Like the 1991 template, in which the showily pious Republican senator John Danforth served as a beard for his peers’ cynicism, the 2018 replay had the window dressing of its own moralistic Hamlet, Jeff Flake.

Donald Trump’s views are notoriously influenced by how things look on TV. With the country watching, how did Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford do?

By many accounts, even Trump was somewhat disarmed by Ford’s testimony — at least enough so to worry, with good reason, that she might impress most of those watching (if not his own base) as credible, courageous, and deeply moving. He was worried as well because in his view Kavanaugh’s pre-hearing prime-time appearance on Fox News had been a flop. He didn’t like his nominee’s PR strategy of presenting himself as a choirboy.

The Kavanaugh that emerged at the hearing understandably was much more to Trump’s liking — he dropped the Mr. Nice Guy pose and let his full Trump roar. He emerged as a bully, a screamer, a conspiracy theorist, a rabid partisan, and a guilt-free purveyor of falsehoods big and small (including about instantly Google-able definitions of sexual terms he used in his high-school yearbook).

For all his self-congratulation about the many (good-looking) women he has appointed clerks, he also behaved like an unalloyed misogynist. In his Fox News interview, he had revealed his contempt for women subtly — by stepping in to man-answer a question the interviewer posed to his wife. In the hearing, he did just what Trump would do: accusing a woman who dared question him (Klobuchar) of the accusation she had raised about him (drinking to excess). If anything, he out-Trumped Trump in one area: While Trump is a teetotaler, Kavanaugh has the personality of a raging, self-pitying, out-of-control drunk. (He seems to think drinking doesn’t count as long as it’s beer.) As he tried to shut Klobuchar down with his bullying and bellowing, it was all too easy to visualize him pushing his hand on the teenage Ford’s mouth to stop her from screaming for help during an attempted rape. It was hardly a surprise that Kavanaugh said he didn’t deign to watch Ford’s testimony.

Trump didn’t think John McCain was a hero, but he was thrilled by Kavanaugh. No wonder. Kavanaugh stood up to Ford and his other accusers as Trump has to the nearly two dozen women (we know about) who have accused him of sexual assault. In light of a NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist pre-hearing poll showing that a majority (54 percent) of Republicans believe that Kavanaugh should be on the court even if it’s true that he assaulted women, he is the ideal Supreme Court justice for the party of Trump. We should not forget, however, that this misogynist culture ruled the GOP well before Trump came along: Grassley, Orrin Hatch, and Lindsey Graham, among so many others, were there first.

Whether in the Senate chamber or out in America, what has this hearing changed, and what has it not?

About the only positive change to come out of this hearing — and I am being facetious — is that we now know that Republican men have been carefully schooled on how to profess “respect” for female victims of sexual assault. They have become expert at intoning that they care about rape victims because they are speaking “as the father of daughters” — as if those of us who are the fathers of sons, or those men who aren’t fathers at all, needn’t give a damn about women who are abused by men. These senators’ behavior at the hearing amply demonstrated that they don’t mean a word of the flowery sentiments some strategist has forced them to memorize. As committee chairman, Grassley set the tone. “You got what you wanted — I’d think you’d be satisfied,” he snapped at Klobuchar as if she were a maidservant after she thwarted his attempt to bulldoze her. Out in the hallway during a break, Lindsey Graham “praised” Ford by calling her “a nice lady”; Hatch’s term of choice was “attractive.” The guiding principle of the hearing, subscribed to by all of these Republican senators, was that men are the victims most worthy of our sympathy in sexual assaults, not women. The grievance of white male victimization — by women, by minorities, by elites — is Trumpism at its ugliest core.

More than a quarter-century later, it feels as if very little has changed since Clarence Thomas was elevated to the court, #MeToo notwithstanding. Had Ford not been white — and from the professional class — you have to wonder whether the Republican men on the committee would have completely dropped their patently phony pretense of concern for her welfare and stabbed her in the front instead of the back. What will follow now is a national tsunami of rage much as there was after the sliming of Anita Hill. And the aggrieved will not just be those “suburban women” politicos keep pigeon-holing, but most women, and more and more men. We have to hope that this rage will sweep more women into office as it did in 1992, the so-called Year of the Woman. And sweep some women out, too, including Susan Collins, whose tired act — repeated, feckless expressions of being “concerned” about Trumpian horrors while doing nothing about them — should be punished by Maine’s voters when she’s up for reelection in 2020.

What an awful day. My colleague at Veep, the showrunner David Mandel, is a master of finding dark humor in Washington horrors, but he reflected my mood, and I imagine that of many, when he said after these hearings that “it’s starting to seem like it was an accident that the country worked as long as it did.” As I write, there’s a faint hope Kavanaugh will not make it to the Court. There’s a less faint hope that the GOP will lose control of at least one chamber of Congress in November.

But even if those battles are won, the fact remains that America has a major political party more dedicated than ever to stripping women of power by any ruthless means it can.