The drama surrounding Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh will continue for at least another week due to an investigation into the sexual assault claims against him.
But it also means that every aspect of his life will now fall under the microscope, even if it has nothing to do with the sexual misconduct claims. Now people have materialized out of the woodwork to claim that Kavanaugh lied about his heavy drinking, yet it’s nothing he denied in front of the committee.
Also, Paul Sperry, a Hoover Institution media fellow, tweeted on Sunday night that one of Kavanaugh’s classmates from Yale sent a tip to the Senate Judiciary Committee that a fraternity brother may have exposed himself to Deborah Ramirez, the second woman who accused Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct.
Looks like the FBI interviewed Kavanaugh’s friend Mike Judge.
Trump said he didn’t mind a comprehensive investigation and it looks like he will get it. From The New York Times:
The White House has authorized the F.B.I. to expand its abbreviated investigation into sexual misconduct allegations against Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh by interviewing anyone it deems necessary as long the review is finished by the end of the week, two people briefed on the matter said on Monday.The new directive came in the past 24 hours after a backlash from Democrats, who criticized the White House for limiting the scope of the bureau’s investigation into President Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court. The F.B.I. has already completed interviews with the four witnesses its agents were originally asked to talk to, the people said.Mr. Trump said on Monday that he favored a “comprehensive” F.B.I. investigation and had no problem if the bureau wanted to question Judge Kavanaugh or even a third accuser who was left off the initial witness list if she seemed credible. His only concerns he said, were that the investigation be wrapped up quickly and that it take direction from the Senate Republicans who will determine whether Judge Kavanaugh is confirmed.“The F.B.I. should interview anybody that they want within reason, but you have to say within reason,” Mr. Trump told reporters in the Rose Garden after an event celebrating a new trade deal with Canada and Mexico. “But they should also be guided, and I’m being guided, by what the senators are looking for.”
The press asked questions about Kavanaugh at the press conference about the new NAFTA deal. He criticized the Democrats and said he knows “them too well” and that those people “are not angels.” He implied that he has seen an “aggressive” Democrat “in very, very bad situations, somewhat compromising.”
Uh…so FAILED Democrat presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s former spokesman wrote an op-ed in Politico to demand that the FBI must investigate what “boofing” means. I kid you not.
Byron York at The Washington Examiner explained how the Democrats have moved the goalposts in their fight to disqualify Kavanaugh from the Supreme Court:
The new developments raised two questions. One, did Kavanaugh actually lie to the Senate about his drinking? And two, why are Democrats, now that they have finally won the FBI investigation they wanted into the sexual misconduct allegations against Kavanaugh, suddenly making a bigger deal of his drinking?On the first, Kavanaugh clearly told the Senate he drank in high school and college. He told the Senate he sometimes drank to excess. But he said he did not black out, nor did he drink so much that he could not remember events that took place while he was drinking.—Some Democrats and their allies in the press suggested Kavanaugh lied in his exchanges with Mitchell and the Democratic senators. But how? Kavanaugh was quite open about the fact that he drank in high school and in college, and also about the fact that he sometimes drank too much. He denied having alcohol-related blackouts, but said he had “gone to sleep” after drinking. On another occasion, responding to Klobuchar, he said “I don’t know” when asked if he had ever drunk so much that he didn’t remember what happened the night before. It’s hard to see where the “federal crime,” as Sen. Sanders put it, is in that testimony.—The problem is, there is nothing in Ludington’s statement that actually contradicts Kavanaugh’s testimony. As noted, Kavanaugh testified that he drank plenty. And Ludington did not say that he, Ludington, ever witnessed Kavanaugh blacked out or passed out from alcohol. It is unclear what, if anything, the FBI would do with such a presentation from Ludington. But such stories are causing great excitement in Democratic Washington at the moment.Why? The answer is the theory behind the Democratic attacks on Kavanaugh.—So the Ford case is quite hard to make. And that is where, for Democrats, Kavanaugh’s supposed blackouts come in. With no contemporaneous evidence that the Ford attack happened, Democrats are trying to make the case that it could have happened. What if Kavanaugh got drunk, attacked Ford, and later didn’t remember that he did it?That is the theory behind some Democratic senators’ questioning of Kavanaugh last week. The idea was to get Kavanaugh to admit alcohol-induced memory loss and thus undermine his firm contention that he did not do what Ford alleged. How could he really know? He himself admitted that he sometimes drank so much he couldn’t remember what happened the night before. He could have attacked Christine Ford in an alcoholic blackout and never remember that he did it.The problem, of course, is that is all anti-Kavanaugh theorizing. There’s no evidence to support it, just as there is no evidence beyond Christine Ford’s word to support the original attack allegation. But it’s what Democrats have to work with right now, and it’s why they are trying to change the subject from alleged sexual misconduct to Kavanaugh’s teenage drinking.
Oh for crying out loud. The New York Times reported that classmate Chad Ludington said that Kavanaugh lied to the committee about his drinking:
Mr. Ludington said that Judge Kavanaugh had played down “the degree and frequency” of his drinking, and that the judge had often become “belligerent and aggressive” while intoxicated. Other former classmates have made similar claims.“It is truth that is at stake, and I believe that the ability to speak the truth, even when it does not reflect well upon oneself, is a paramount quality we seek in our nation’s most powerful judges,” Mr. Ludington said, adding that he planned to “take my information to the F.B.I.”Mr. Ludington, a professor at North Carolina State University who appears to have made small political contributions to Democratic candidates, said to The New York Times on Sunday that he had been told by the F.B.I.’s Washington, D.C., field office that he should go to the bureau’s Raleigh, N.C., office on Monday morning. He said he intended to do that, so he could “tell the full details of my story.”
The Washington Post has more:
In it, Ludington says in one instance, Kavanaugh initiated a fight that led to the arrest of a mutual friend: “When Brett got drunk, he was often belligerent and aggressive. On one of the last occasions I purposely socialized with Brett, I witnessed him respond to a semi-hostile remark, not by defusing the situation, but by throwing his beer in the man’s face and starting a fight that ended with one of our mutual friends in jail.”Ludington says he was deeply troubled by Kavanaugh appearing to blatantly mischaracterize his drinking in Senate testimony.“I do not believe that the heavy drinking or even loutish behavior of an 18 or even 21 year old should condemn a person for the rest of his life,” Ludington wrote. “However … if he lied about his past actions on national television, and more especially while speaking under oath in front of the United States Senate, I believe those lies should have consequences.”
Legal Insurrection has confirmed that such a tip was received. Whether the tip is correct remains to be seen.
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