New hearings, little reason for hope.
O n September 14, after Senator Dianne Feinstein issued a cryptic statement about a vague accusation made anonymously against Judge Brett Kavanaugh, we expressed the view that he needed no defense against such an obviously cynical aspersion. Democrats on the Judiciary Committee had known about the accusation since July and said nothing about it during Kavanaugh’s lengthy confirmation hearings. Their aim was obvious: to delay the committee’s vote, perhaps pushing it past the midterm elections.
Over the weekend, Kavanaugh’s accuser, academic psychologist Christine Blasey Ford, detailed her allegations in the Washington Post. Her charges deserve a hearing.
If Ford were able to prove or substantially corroborate her claims—that Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed and violently groped her—he would be obliged to withdraw from the nomination. Kavanaugh was only 17 at the time, but the position he seeks is the highest judicial office in the land. This is not a criminal investigation but an elevation. And since he now denies the encounter ever took place at all, any proof of Ford’s claim of assault would mean that he lied.
Such proof is unlikely. Ford did not tell anyone about the incident for 30 years. That itself is not evidence that her claims are invented, as some of her harshest critics are suggesting. Assault victims often choose to keep quiet about their experiences, sometimes for years. But it complicates matters here.
In Ford’s telling, the incident happened 36 years ago, in 1982. The first time Ford mentioned this to anybody was 30 years later, during a 2012 therapy session. Well-meaning witnesses routinely misremember details after much shorter lengths of time and do so under sworn testimony. It is not inconceivable that Ford has misremembered important details of her experience. Her claims are uncorroborated. The two people she’s said with certainty were present, Kavanaugh and journalist Mark Judge, have both strongly denied that any such incident took place at all. Kavanaugh has reportedly asserted that he didn’t do what he’s accused of doing, but that his accuser may well be confusing him with someone else.
Several important discrepancies in her story have already emerged. Initially, she said there were two boys in the room, Kavanaugh and Judge, when the assault took place. Her therapist in 2012 wrote that there were four boys present, a discrepancy Ford attributed to a mistake on the therapist’s part. Now Ford’s attorney, Debra Katz, indicates that there was a second girl present, too. It’s unclear if there were two boys and Ford, four boys and Ford, two boys and Ford and another woman, or four boys and Ford and another woman. Bear in mind, too, that Ford did not attend school with Kavanaugh—they both attended single-sex institutions—and so likely did not know him well or at all. The therapist’s notes, seen by the Washington Post, only say she was attacked by boys “from an elitist boys’ school.”
The evidence of Kavanaugh’s scrupulosity and decency, by contrast, is both weighty and, apart from Ford’s accusation, unchallenged. None of the witnesses Democrats produced during the hearings cast any doubt on Kavanaugh’s character. He has been subjected to no fewer than six FBI background investigations. These are not perfunctory checks but highly invasive explorations of the subject’s biography that involve scores of interviews with people who knew him at all points in his life and worked with him.
Another point on character. As National Review ’s David French points out, men inclined to the behavior of which Kavanaugh is accused rarely act on it just once. If he’s a sexual aggressor, one might expect that such behavior would have shown up to federal investigators. It didn’t.
Senate Republicans have decided Kavanaugh should defend himself, and he is ready to do so. Charles Grassley, Judiciary Committee chairman, has scheduled a hearing for Monday. Kavanaugh and Ford will both testify, according to reports. Predictably, Democrats on the committee, having sought these new hearings, now argue that it’s too soon to hold them. They remind us, as if we needed reminding, that their goal is not to discover the truth but to delay the hearings and kill the nomination.
We don’t yet know enough to come to firm conclusions about the veracity of her claims. And unless something changes, we never will.
But the motives of Senate Democrats are abundantly clear. They’ve acted in bad faith extraordinary even for these fraught times, in the initial hearings themselves and now, in seeking new ones not primarily to obtain more information but to delay and even derail the Kavanaugh nomination.
The behavior of Dianne Feinstein has been particularly disgraceful. The senior senator from California was first made aware of the allegations in July. She did nothing with them. She did not immediately pass them onto law enforcement so they might be included in Kavanaugh’s background investigations. She did not share them with all other senators on the committee so that they might work together to determine how to address the charge. She did not raise them during the confirmation hearings or privately in discussions with Kavanaugh. Why? According to a report in the New Yorker, “a source familiar with the committee’s activities said that Feinstein’s staff initially conveyed to other Democratic members’ offices that the incident was too distant in the past to merit public discussion.”
What changed? It’s a good question. Whatever the explanation, the fact that Feinstein issued a public statement announcing her referral of the accusation to law enforcement makes clear she wanted it out in public. And given the conduct of Democrats throughout this entire ugly process, cynics might be forgiven for wondering if the whole thing was ginned up in advance as one last desperate attempt to bring down the nomination.
Senator Susan Collins, Republican from Maine, put it well in an interview with the New York Times. “What is puzzling to me is the Democrats, by not bringing this out earlier, after having had this information for more than six weeks, have managed to cast a cloud of doubt on both the professor and the judge,” Collins said. “If they believed Professor Ford, why didn’t they surface this information earlier so that he could be questioned about it? And if they didn’t believe her and chose to withhold the information, why did they decide at the 11th hour to release it? It is really not fair to either of them the way it is was handled.
