Wednesday, October 09, 2024

Democratic senator accuses Trump of steering FBI investigation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh

I LIKE BEER SENATOR, DO YOU LIKE BEER?


Bart Jansen, USA TODAY
Updated Tue, October 8, 2024 

WASHINGTON – Former President Donald Trump said in 2018 the FBI would have “free rein” to investigate allegations against his Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, but a report Tuesday from a Senate Democrat found the investigation “flawed and incomplete” without following up on multiple leads.

The report from a member of the Judiciary Committee, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., criticized the FBI for not investigating more fully the claims of Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual misconduct described by two women. Kavanaugh has denied the allegations.

Whitehouse’s report said the FBI didn’t investigate thousands of tips it received, but passed them along to the White House.

“The supplemental background investigation was flawed and incomplete, as the FBI did not follow up on numerous leads that could have produced potentially corroborating or otherwise relevant information,” the report said.

While “President Trump publicly claimed the FBI had ‘free rein’ to take any investigative steps it deemed necessary, the Trump White House exercised total control over the scope of the investigation, preventing the FBI from interviewing relevant witnesses and following up on tips,"the report concluded.

President Donald Trump speaks next to Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh as they participate in a ceremonial public swearing-in in the East Room of the White House in Washington, on Oct. 8, 2018.

Whitehouse alleges the Trump administration "kneecap(ped)" FBI investigators and "misled the Senate."

Kavanaugh didn’t respond to a request for comment.

Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt said in a statement the "ridiculous story" about the report was a way to "delegitimize the Supreme Court and pave the way for Kamala Harris to pack the Court with Radical-Left Judges."

"Everyone knows Brett Kavanaugh was unfairly slandered and smeared with lies in a Democrat-led hoax to derail his appointment to the Court that ultimately failed," Leavitt said.

The FBI said in a statement it responds to requests from the White House counsel’s office to conduct background investigations of candidates for government posts. In contrast to its criminal investigations, the FBI doesn’t have the authority to expand the scope of its background investigations beyond what the White House requests.

"In these investigations, the FBI follows a long-standing, established process through which the scope of the investigation is limited to what is requested,” the agency said. “We have consistently followed that process for decades and did so for the Kavanaugh inquiry.”

Christine Blasey Ford closes her eyes as she is sworn in before testifying to the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing for President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh on Capitol Hill in Washington, on Sept. 27, 2018.

The report revisits one of the most contentious Supreme Court confirmations in a generation that nearly scuttled Kavanaugh’s nomination. Kavanaugh was confirmed on a nearly party-line vote of 50-48, with Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia the only Democrat joining Republicans supporting him. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, voted present.

Trump nominated Kavanaugh, who had served on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals for 12 years, to the Supreme Court on July 9, 2018. Allegations of sexual misconduct began to surface two months later despite not being uncovered in the FBI’s background investigation.

Trump denied at the time that he limited the FBI investigation and that "I want them to interview whoever they deem appropriate, at their discretion."

Christine Blasey Ford, a professor at Palo Alto University, told the Senate in a letter that Kavanaugh “physically and sexually assaulted her” during high school by locking her in a bedroom, climbing on top of her and attempting to remove her clothes. She later testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Ford’s lawyers, Debra Katz and Lisa Banks, said the report confirmed the FBI investigation was a “sham” that gave cover to Republicans to confirm Kavanaugh.

“The Congressional report published today confirms what we long suspected: the FBI supplemental investigation of then-nominee Brett Kavanaugh was, in fact, a sham effort directed by the Trump White House to silence brave victims and other witnesses who came forward and to hide the truth,” the lawyers said in a statement. “As a result of this effort, anyone who came forward with concerns to the FBI was re-directed, without investigation, to the Trump White House which intentionally buried the information.”

A classmate of Kavanaugh’s at Yale University, Deborah Ramirez, told the New Yorker that Kavanaugh “exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party.”

Kavanaugh publicly denied both allegations.

Whitehouse, a former U.S. attorney and state attorney general, said he continued to review the FBI’s performance because of serious questions during the confirmation process for a lifetime appointment to the court.

“The Trump White House thwarted proper FBI investigation of the allegations against Kavanaugh, denying Senators information needed to fulfill our constitutional duties,” Whitehouse said in a post on X. “Senators, and the American people, deserve real answers – not manufactured misdirection – when such serious questions about a lifetime nominee emerge late in the confirmation process.”

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump accused of steering FBI investigation into Brett Kavanaugh

In New Report Into FBI’s Half-Baked Kavanaugh Probe, Thomas-Hill Parallels Abound


Kate Riga
TPM
Tue, October 8, 2024 



The two cases already drew obvious parallels, 30 years apart: Men are nominated for the Supreme Court, their elevation prompts revelations of alleged past harms done to multiple women, Republicans go into total-war mode to smear the women and defend their nominees, Democrats and the FBI fail to protect the women or disqualify the nominees.

But perhaps the most striking parallel between the accusations against Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas, revealed in a new Senate report on the FBI’s 2018 “investigation” into Kavanaugh’s behavior, are the witnesses — with the potential to sink the nominations — who were silenced.

“Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee also individually contacted the FBI to provide names of people with potentially corroborating or otherwise relevant information who had reached out after trying — but failing — to get in touch with FBI investigators,” the report read.

The FBI received over 4,500 tips on Kavanaugh during its investigation, but only interviewed 10 people (omitting both Kavanaugh and his first public accuser, Christine Blasey Ford), per the report. These may have included more critical information like that provided by Max Stier, who could not reach the FBI investigators and would later tell the New York Times about a dorm party where Kavanaugh drunkenly pulled down his pants and his friends thrust his genitals into the hand of a female student — strikingly similar to the testimony of Deborah Ramirez, which the FBI dismissed as “uncorroborated.”

Few people remember today (if they were ever told) that Anita Hill, too, was far from alone in her historic testimony about Thomas’ workplace stalking and harassment.

Angela Wright, a former Equal Employment Opportunity Commission employee under Thomas, flew to Washington D.C. during the hearings under subpoena, prepared to tell the committee about her experience with Thomas hounding her for dates, calling her leg hair “sexy,” asking for her bra size at a farewell banquet for a coworker, coming to her apartment at night, uninvited.

“The thrust of my concerns at this point was to not watch a woman — who I believed in my gut to be telling the truth about a man who I believe to be totally capable of doing what she said he did — the thrust of my concern was not to watch her become victimized, when I knew of similar situations that I had had with Mr. Thomas,” Wright told the Senate Judiciary committee staffers, as part of testimony which would be included later in a committee report that basically no one read.

She sat in a Virginia hotel room for three days, and was never called to speak before committee members.

And she wasn’t alone. Rose Jourdain, a former elderly speechwriter at the EEOC, had been Wright’s confidant and was sitting in a hospital room, ready to confirm her allegations.

Sukari Hardnett, Thomas’s former special assistant at the EEOC, wrote a letter to the committee after trying to reach out with relevant information and being ignored, telling them that all the Black women who worked for Thomas knew they were “being auditioned,” that they could embrace the harassment and be “summoned constantly” or rebuff it and be treated as a “leper.” Her own attempt to transfer away from his attentions left her an “outcast” for the rest of her time at the agency, she wrote.

All three women expected to testify; none did. Their accusations were buried in an enormous committee report that even some of its members didn’t read until Thomas was already confirmed. In both cases, corroborating witnesses were silenced and excluded, leaving Ford and Hill alone to be smeared, threatened and discredited.

There are many galling things about the new report, published six years after Kavanaugh’s confirmation: Donald Trump’s White House’s brazen and successful efforts to curtail the investigation, the many Republican senators citing the FBI report to justify their vote for Kavanaugh, the Biden White House’s reluctance to cooperate with Senate Democrats, which prolonged the probe even further.

Biden has said that he believes Wright’s televised testimony, in addition to Hill’s, would have sunk Thomas’ nomination. It’s infuriating to imagine what the corroborating information contained in those 4,500 tips would have done to Kavanaugh — as he and Thomas sit side-by-side on the nation’s highest court, enjoying a lifetime tenure.

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