Brett Kavanaugh will face an FBI investigation after all. President Donald Trump’s pick to replace Anthony Kennedy on the U.S. Supreme Court has faced rounds of credible allegations of sexual assault, but if certain interests on the right had their way, he’d be sailing right onto the bench without a hitch.
New revelations from The New Yorker reveal the extent to which Republicans have sought to block investigation. Senior Republican staffer for the Senate Judiciary Committee Mike Davis refused to hear a second claimed victim out after their legal team refused to cede to his intrusive demands for evidence to be handed over, or else.
The victim at the center of that issue is Deborah Ramirez, who brought forward her story of facing sexual abuse from Kavanaugh at a college party after a first woman, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, explained how he violently attempted to rape her during their high school days.
Ford eventually testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee, appearing this past Thursday. That hearing was a flashpoint in American politics, with tensions flaring on both sides — those who believe women, and those who don’t. Ramirez’s case, though, has never gotten that far.
Senate Judiciary Committee staff reached out to her legal team shortly after the publication of the initial piece detailing her story in The New Yorker — and that’s where things went downhill. Ramirez’s attorney John Clune proposed that he and Senate staff speak over the phone to discuss matters further, but Davis wouldn’t even cede to that. Instead, he demanded that he be informed of Ramirez’s precise plans regarding future possibilities of testimony before the committee and have any and all relevant evidence handed over.
Clune didn’t want to do that, though. What lawyer would be keen on passing possibly crucial evidence off to an interest which could inform the defense about it? He wasn’t happy with the plan of possibly exposing his strategy and information to scrutiny from Kavanaugh.
Clune explained further:
‘Almost immediately in our correspondence, [committee staff] became less interested in hearing from [Ramirez] and more interested in discovering what witnesses we could bring forward. Since it was only the majority staff that made these demands, as the minority staff questioned those demands as unprecedented, we became suspicious that any disclosures we might file would be shared inappropriately with Judge Kavanaugh or others to prepare and attack Debbie’s account.’
He adds:
‘It is remarkable that the committee admits they had enough information to question Judge Kavanaugh under oath on Debbie’s statements in The New Yorker, yet that very same information was insufficient for Debbie’s counsel to earn even a phone call.’
Clune has actually revealed elsewhere that Senate Judiciary Committee staff abandoned phone calls that had at one point been set, but the report from The New Yorker reveals a fuller picture.
When a minority staffer on the email chain in question tried to herself set up a call with Clune, Davis shot that down too, butting in over Heather Sawyer and Clune and insisting that his demands must be met before anything moved forward.
They never were. However, as mentioned, in the face of mounting public pressure, key GOP Senators insisted that there must be a renewed FBI investigation into Kavanaugh’s past after all. What happens next remains to be seen.
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