A new book written by two New York Times reporters, excerpted in an article at the NYTimes, about the nomination and confirmation of Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh purports to raise new evidence about Kavanaugh’s supposed sexual misconduct while at Yale.
The new accusations do not hold up to scrutiny and are self-contradictory, but that has not stopped Democrat presidential candidates Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Julian Castro, and Robert “Beto” O’Rourke from calling for Kavanaugh’s impeachment.
The problems with the supposed bombshells in the book? There are many.
First, let’s review the horror show Democrats inflicted on Kavanaugh (and America) during his confirmation proceedings. This is important because the latest allegation is directly tied to those proceedings and indicates that Democrats will never leave the newest Supreme Court Justice alone. They will keep dogging him with spurious allegations and invented nastiness for the foreseeable future.
Democrats were furious when Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) refused, quite rightly, to hold confirmation hearings for Merrick Garland following the tragic death of Antonin Scalia during a presidential election year. The left is still incensed about this and, like the NYTimes editorial board, insists that the seat on the high court was “stolen” from Garland. It was not.
Though mostly focused on procedural maneuvers like the filibuster and failed attempts to paint Neil Gorsuch as a fringe wing-nut, Democrats and their leftist acolytes in the media test ran some of the tactics later used on Kavanaugh.
For example, prior to Gorsuch’s confirmation, they dug up a high school yearbook that highlighted a satirical club and proceeded to insist that the joke was not a joke. It didn’t work, but it set the stage for later smears against Kavanaugh.
Remember the infamous “fart joke” portion of the Senate confirmation proceedings? Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) intoned his consternation over rumors that, at age 16, Kavanaugh told a “fart joke” in his high school yearbook. Needless to say, that episode was humiliating for Whitehouse and quickly dumped down the memory hole by the leftstream activist media.
High school yearbooks, you could almost hear Dems thinking, are not working. What else can we use? We can’t use procedure, and we can’t assail his record. Tried those with Gorsuch and fell flat on our faces. Looking around anxiously. Hey, that #MeToo thing is pretty hot right now, let’s try that!
And that is what came next. Outrageous, ludicrous, and unsubstantiated claims of alleged sexual misconduct in high school and college. Julie Swetnick’s story about drugging and raping high school party gangs didn’t add up from Day One, but it was front and center of the “debate” for weeks.
Christine Blasey Ford’s story fell apart in short order. Not only did none of her named eyewitnesses substantiate her story, but she didn’t know anything about the alleged incident.
I blogged about this last fall:
Christine Blasey Ford’s letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) kicked off what has to be—and will go down in history as being—among the most embarrassing and shameful episodes related to the confirmation of a Supreme Court Justice in recent memory.Feinstein chose to sit on the letter and only reveal it after the confirmation hearings had concluded, putting Ford in the unenviable position of having to present her testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee under the media spotlight and with all the hopes and dreams of vindication of the radical left on her shoulders.She couldn’t deliver. The persons she claimed were witnesses were unable to substantiate her claims, and it didn’t help that her story didn’t hold up even under the most casual scrutiny. Where did this assault take place? She didn’t know. When did it take place? She didn’t know. How did she get to the location of the assault or get home from that same location? She didn’t know. Who was there? She claimed that four people were and named them, but none of them substantiated her claim.Republicans did everything they could to hear her out, even offering at one point to come to California since she claimed she had a fear of flying (a fear that is debunked by her extensive air travel records). She had her day in front of the Senate committee, and it didn’t go well for her.
As Professor Jacobson noted in late 2018, the Ed Whelan theory of Christine Ford’s mistaken identification of Kavanaugh ultimately prevailed.
Democrats were so horrific about the process, that they managed the unthinkable: they opened Sen. Lindsey Graham’s eyes to their duplicitous, cynical nature. His “Boy, y’all want power, I hope you never get it” takedown is one for the history books.
So onerous was the leftstream media’s coverage of Kavanaugh that one of his former classmates has sued the Huffington Post for defamation.
Ultimately, the Senate Judiciary filed its final report: it found “no evidence to substantiate any of the claims of sexual assault made against Justice Kavanaugh.” The FBI likewise found no evidence of wrong-doing on Kavanaugh’s part. Multiple times.
It’s been a year since Kavanaugh was confirmed, and the left is still trying to destroy him. The New York Times published a hit piece on Saturday in which they allege that Kavanaugh, at a drunken college party, was walking around naked when some friends “pushed his penis” into the hand of a girl.
The article is taken from an upcoming book written by anti- Kavanaugh activists.
The National Review explains the alleged “bombshell” incident:
If you opened Twitter on Sunday morning, you were likely greeted with the bombshell headline of the top trending news story: “NYT reporters’ book details new sexual assault allegation against Brett Kavanaugh.”The allegation, Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly write in a New York Times story adapted from their forthcoming anti-Kavanaugh book, is this: “We also uncovered a previously unreported story about Mr. Kavanaugh in his freshman year that echoes Ms. Ramirez’s allegation. A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.”Wait a second. Who did what to whom?
Kavanaugh’s “friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student”?. . . . All that the authors write in the New York Times essay about corroborating the story is this: “Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the F.B.I. about this account, but the F.B.I. did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly. (We corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier.)”
Lending any credence to this absurdity feels silly and awkward, but let’s go there. If this allegation is accurate, we have to ask: Who is the victim here, anyway? Did “some friends” allegedly touch Kavanaugh’s penis without his consent? It certainly seems that way from the narrative related by the NYTimes activists.
The National Review continues:
If you take this confusing accusation in the essay at face value, it doesn’t even appear to be an allegation of assault against Kavanaugh.If Kavanaugh’s “friends pushed his penis,” then isn’t it an allegation of wrongdoing against Kavanaugh’s “friends,” not Kavanaugh himself? Surely even a modern liberal Yalie who’s been to one of those weird non-sexual “naked parties” would recognize both the female student and Kavanaugh are both alleged victims in this alleged incident, barring an additional allegation that a college-aged Kavanaugh asked his “friends” to “push his penis.”
The girl in question, by the way, reportedly has no memory of the incident.
In any case, Stier’s claim, which even two Democratic senators’ offices didn’t find particularly worthwhile, was that he had seen an inebriated Kavanaugh, pants-down, at a freshman-year party. Stier’s claim to the staffers, we’re told, was that other people at the party put Kavanaugh’s genitalia into the hands of a classmate. Another unnamed person alleged said that he or she might have remembered hearing that the female student had transferred out of her college because of Kavanaugh, “though exactly why was unclear.”The reporters, who describe Democrats in glowing terms and Republicans otherwise, say that Stier is a “respected thought leader” in the defense of the federal bureaucracy. They don’t mention his history of working for the Clintons. As for the victim? They say she “has refused to discuss the incident, though several of her friends said she does not recall it.”To repeat: Several of her friends said she does not recall it.
I’m pretty sure I would remember someone putting his penis (or having some friends put someone’s penis—how does that work, exactly?) in my hand at a party. Her lack of memory of the incident is certainly noteworthy, it’s hard to claim that you are were sexually assaulted if you don’t recall the incident.
But it doesn’t appear she is claiming she was sexually assaulted; in fact, it seems that NYTimes activists are claiming, or at the very least implying, this based on the allegations of an alleged witness who has deep ties to the Clintons.
Also discussed in the NYTimes hit piece are the (self-)debunked allegations by Deborah Ramirez. Back in 2018, we learned that Kenneth Appold, a classmate of Ramirez, wasn’t present when the alleged incident involving Ramirez occurred, but he was super certain he’d heard about it.
The “new evidence” entails more people who weren’t there but are reportedly sure they heard about it. Or something.
The new allegation is supposed to help lend credence to the on-the-record allegation that Kavanaugh’s Yale classmate Deborah Ramirez made in 2018. Pogrebin and Kelly sum up Ramirez’s allegation: “She and some classmates had been drinking heavily when, she says, a freshman named Brett Kavanaugh pulled down his pants and thrust his penis at her, prompting her to swat it away and inadvertently touch it. Some of the onlookers, who had been passing around a fake penis earlier in the evening, laughed.”. . . . Pogrebin and Kelly write that a couple of students say they had heard about the alleged incident in the days after it allegedly occurred, but the authors provide no indication there is any first-hand witness to corroborate the allegation.We already knew before Kavanaugh was confirmed last October that the “corroborating” source for Ramirez’s claim, classmate Kenneth Appold, was not present when the alleged incident occurred, but Appold told the New Yorker he was “one-hundred-percent-sure” he heard about it from an eyewitness. Shortly before Kavanaugh was confirmed, the New Yorker reported that Appold’s supposed eyewitness “said that he had no memory of the incident.”Maybe Pogrebin and Kelly’s book is stronger than their essay. But I’m skeptical. “In the end they turn up no smoking gun,” Hanna Rosin writes in her New York Times review of the book.
As is typical with the herd-following leftists in the 2020 Democrat presidential primary clown car, the candidates fell over themselves calling for Kavanaugh’s impeachment. Based entirely on this latest and deeply problematic “scoop” from the NYTimes.
Sen. Bernie Sanders and Robert “Beto” O’Rourke are also calling for Kavanaugh to be impeached. Well, Bernie kind of hedges, but . . .
Top 2020 Democratic contenders Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Beto O’Rourke, and Julian Castro announced on Sunday that Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh “must be impeached,” after a new, uncorroborated and disputed allegation of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh surfaced in a weekend New York Times piece.. . . . “Yesterday, we learned of another accusation against Brett Kavanaugh—one we didn’t find out about before he was confirmed because the Senate forced the F.B.I. to rush its investigation to save his nomination,” O’Rourke said. “We know he lied under oath. He should be impeached.”. . . . Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, said he backed getting rid of Kavanaugh by any legal means available: “The revelations today confirm what we already knew: During his hearing, Kavanaugh faced credible accusations and likely lied to Congress. I support any appropriate constitutional mechanism to hold him accountable.”
In response to this onslaught, McConnell responded:
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President Trump is also having none of it and is pushing back. Hard.
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