“The American people deserve to know why the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee waited nearly three months to hand this disqualifying document over to federal authorities.”
SAN FRANCISCO — California state Sen. Kevin de León, the Democratic progressive aggressively challenging Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) for reelection, said in a statement Friday that she is guilty of a “failure of leadership’’ in her handling of a letter by an unnamed woman alleging sexual misconduct by Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh.
“The American people deserve to know why the ranking member on the Senate Judiciary Committee waited nearly three months to hand this disqualifying document over to federal authorities,’’ De Leon said in a statement released Friday and first provided to POLITICO. “And why Senator Feinstein politely pantomimed her way through last week’s hearing without a single question about the content of Kavanaugh’s character.”
The blistering statement comes on the heels of de León criticism that Feinstein, 85, has been too timid and accommodating to Republicans during the confirmation hearings of Kavanaugh.
De León said in his statement that “to be clear, the anonymity of the person who wrote this letter must be protected at all costs.” But he added, “its contents reveal a harrowing account that must be considered as Republicans move forward to confirm the greatest threat to our constitutional and human rights in a generation.”
The state senator, who is the author of California’s controversial “sanctuary state” law, is engaged in an impassioned uphill battle to deny Feinstein her fifth full term in office. He has repeatedly called on Democrats to use bare-knuckle tactics to derail the nomination of Kavanaugh, whom Democrats — including Feinstein — have said represents serious threat to the future of Roe v. Wade.
Feinstein, in a statement Friday, defended her handling of the Kavanaugh complaint.
«Senator Feinstein was given information about Judge Kavanaugh through a third party,» the statement read. «The Senator took these allegations seriously and believed they should be public. However, the woman in question made it clear she did not want this information to be public. It is critical in matters of sexual misconduct to protect the identity of the victim when they wish to remain anonymous, and the senator did so in this case.»
During the recent hearings, Feinstein drew de León’s sharpest barbs when she appeared to apologize for dozens of protesters who repeatedly disrupted the hearings, saying to her fellow senators that she was “sorry for the circumstances, but we’ll get through them.’
“Comity right now is not needed in the U. S. Senate,’ De León told the San Diego Union Tribune. He said that Kavanaugh’s nomination was an example of an action by the Trump administration that “requires extraordinary efforts that are out of the box and not the same old, tired Washington playbook of yesterday.”
And he tweeted: “We should be praising the protesters and standing outside with them, not apologizing for their actions. We need a senator from California who will stand up and #RESIST not #ASSIST.” On the first day of the hearings, he tweeted: “70 arrested and not a single @SenateDems. We have to switch tactics.”
De León recently won the endorsement of the California Democratic Party executive committee over Feinstein, in part because left-leaning party activists complained she was too out of touch with progressive values in solidly blue California.
Feinstein, who was first elected in 1992’s “Year of the Woman,’’ has far outraised de León in the race, with $10 million in the bank compared to de Leon’s $672,000 at the end of the first quarter. She also held a comfortable 44-11 percent lead over de León in the June primary, when she won every district in California.
But with just weeks until the election, a recent poll by Probolsky Research, a Republican polling firm, suggested that her lead over the former state Senate pro tem has shrunk to 8 points — 37-29 percent — with 34 percent of voters still undecided.
