2nd Day Of Kavanaugh Hearing Turns Into Sh*t Show After Democrat Refuses To Give In

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Wednesday, the second day of confirmation hearings for President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh got underway, and the eyecatching moments just keep piling up. The day after the confirmation process struggled to get underway at all in the face of protests from citizen demonstrators and Democratic U.S. Senators, Vermont’s U.S. Senator Patrick Leahy (D) accused Kavanaugh of benefiting from information on court nominees that had been stolen from Democrats back when he worked for President George W. Bush.

Kavanaugh struggled to find an answer to the allegations.

Leahy asked:

‘Now when you worked at the White House did anybody ever tell you they had a mole that provided you with secret information related to nominations?’

Kavanaugh responded by focusing more on Leahy’s choice of words than on the actual substance of the Senator’s question, quipping:

‘I don’t remember the reference to a ‘mole’ which sounds highly specific, but certainly it is common I think, for everyone to talk to each other, at times, and share information.’

Leahy pressed him again, getting more specific and asking if he’d ever “received information from an email from a Republican staff member claiming to come from spying.”

Kavanaugh dismissed the seriousness of the line of questioning altogether, explaining that if he had received information claimed to be garnered from “spying,” he wouldn’t have taken the assertion literally.

This is the guy who Trump wants on the U.S. Supreme Court — unconcerned enough with cyber threats to suggest he’d have completely dismissed claims of spying back in the 2000s. That response is particularly ironic, considering how relevant cyber threats are to the present day political situation. The U.S. is continuing to struggle to figure out how to best deal with Russian intrusion into the 2016 elections, hardly helped in that effort by a president who decries the whole thing as a “witch hunt.”

The cyber scandal that Leahy asserted Wednesday that Kavanaugh was complicit in involved the theft of Democratic memos detailing their strategies to oppose then-President George W. Bush’s judicial nominees. Senators Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) were among those who first raised an alarm at the memo theft.

Wednesday, Leahy asserted that there are emails that indicate that while working for the Bush White House, Kavanaugh had ample reason to believe that material had been stolen from the Democrats. Iowa Republican U.S. Senator and Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley lashed out at the Vermont legislator, asserting that all material that was relevant had been made available. However, Leahy named a specific set of emails that he wanted to be able to ask Kavanaugh about in the public hearing that had previously been kept “committee confidential.”

Watch below.

Leahy’s questioning about Kavanaugh’s part in the scandal in question is among a whole array of points related to the SCOTUS nominee that are under scrutiny. For instance, his apparent view that sitting presidents should be free from the burdens of investigations — like Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia probe — came up Wednesday, but he called the prospect of a president facing a subpoena a “potential hypothetical” — although it’s really not.

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In the end, the saga of Kavanaugh’s confirmation process is continuing this week, as Democrats try and get information out they claim Republicans are trying to hide.

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