It looks like Breitbart found the put-away shot to take down Kavanaugh’s accuser. She believes in science.
Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who claims she was physically attacked at a high school party by Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh three decades ago, has taken part in events opposing President Donald Trump, including a science march in California last year where she donned a version of the “pussy hats” worn at the January 2017 Women’s March.
Blasey Ford is cited in a San Jose Mercury News article as wearing the hat at the march, which the newspaper said was held because people were “angered by the Trump administration’s proposed cuts to research.”
“It’s a science party!” said biostatistician Christine Blasey, of Palo Alto, who will wear an elaborately knitted cap of the human brain — yarn turned into a supersized cerebral cortex — inspired by the “pussy hats” donned during the Women’s Marches. “Getting introverted people to the march — that’s huge,” [Blasey] laughed.
A photo of those hats is featured in the article and is accompanied by the caption, “Pleasanton knitter Eilene Cross made ‘brain caps’ for the upcoming March for Science, to be worn by friend Christine Blasey of Palo Alto.”
The article continued:
This is a movement of the sensible-shoe’d majority, people who carefully pack snacks, wear sunscreen and reduce their environmental footprint at the marches by buying carbon offsets from nonprofits like The Nature Conservancy.
They’re deeply worried that political leaders are ignoring scientific evidence, aren’t committed to fighting climate change and are calling for significant cuts to national science programs.
That wraps this whole ugly mess up, amirite? She’s crazy.
“[Brett Kavanaugh] is not just a conservative jurist. He’s not John Roberts. He’s not even Neil Gorsuch. He’s a Republican operative who is posing as a judge” — Sen. Brian Schatz, D-Hawaii, on Pod Save America
After the news broke on Friday about an anonymous, decades-old accusation of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, Salon’s Amanda Marcotte expressed little surprise at the possibility it might have happened. As she pointed out, despite all the treacly paeans to Kavanaugh the kindly “basketball dad,” his jurisprudence as a federal judge was enough to show his hostility to women’s rights. It wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine that he might have acted upon such impulses at some point in his life.
After all, the president who nominated Kavanaugh for the high court has bragged about assaulting women and more than a dozen have come forward to say that he wasn’t idly boasting when he said that. During his confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kavanaugh seemed to be as unconcerned with those allegations as the rest of his party.
Over the weekend, Republicans circled the wagons. The anonymous accuser had named a conservative writer named Mark Judge as Kavanaugh’s teenage accomplice in the assault. Judge came forward to say that he had “no recollection” of such an event saying, “It’s just absolutely nuts. I never saw Brett act that way.” That might be true, since Judge has written extensively about the wild, debauched atmosphere at the all-male prep school he and Kavanaugh attended in suburban Maryland, and admits to having been a blackout drunk during that period.
That doesn’t exactly help Kavanaugh’s case. Neither does it help that Kavanaugh later joined a notoriously dissipated and drunken fraternity at Yale and belonged to an equally licentious secret society that even today remains one of the few all-male groups on campus. None of that is evidence that Kavanaugh assaulted anyone, to be sure. But it does call into question the Boy Scout image his sponsors so assiduously created during his confirmation hearings.
On Sunday, the woman who had lodged the complaint came forward to tell her story. She is a professor of psychology at Palo Alto University named Christine Blasey Ford, and she told the Washington Post that she was the author of the letter detailing the alleged sexual assault by Kavanaugh and Judge in the 1980s, when all three were high school students. It’s a harrowing story, which Ford’s therapist had documented in her files years ago. Ford says she was reluctant to come forward because she knew that it would make her life unbearable. She’s undoubtedly right. Kavanaugh’s defenders are going to come after her with everything they have.
The Republicans are already shrieking about the Democrats playing dirty pool, which is as ironic as it gets. It was Republicans who threw away the rule book to hold a Supreme Court seat open for nearly a year so they could appoint a hard-right conservative. They are making the case that this “unprovable” accusation is unfair because, as one Townhall writer expressed on Twitter, “I don’t know how it would be remotely just to derail the nomination of someone who’s spent an adult lifetime building a personal & professional reputation based on this exceptionally thin standard.”
Perhaps that’s true, but it doesn’t get Kavanaugh off the hook. In fact, it should make everyone go back and take a closer look at Kavanaugh’s personal and professional reputation. When it comes to unfairness and character assassination, he’s an expert.
Here is just one example to illustrate the depth of his character deficiencies. Back in the 1990s, conservative activists went to DefCon One when Bill Clinton came into office. A whole group of young conservative lawyers joined the cause, Kavanaugh among them. His first big job for the movement was as Ken Starr’s point man on the Vince Foster case.
Indeed, it was Kavanaugh who pushed for the investigation even though Foster’s death had been amply covered by congressional committees, the local police, the FBI and the first special counsel Robert Fisk, all of whom had concluded found that the former deputy White House counsel had committed suicide. But Kavanaugh was deep in the right-wing fever swamp and argued to Starr that they could unscrupulously use the fact that there were unfounded conspiracy theories surrounding Foster’s death to reopen the case, despite the grieving family’s desperate pleas for the government to stop the “outrageous innuendo and speculation for political ends.”
Kavanaugh was apparently particularly interested in Rush Limbaugh’s odious suggestion to his legions of listeners that Foster had been murdered in an apartment secretly owned by Hillary Clinton. He spent three years and $2 million attempting to dig up dirt on the dead man, at one point demanding that Foster’s teenage daughter give the authorities specimens of her hair — an apparent attempt to prove or imply that a hair found on Foster’s jacket had belonged to Hillary Clinton.
Kavanaugh asked everyone involved about this nonexistent affair between Clinton and Foster — even, eventually, Clinton herself. It later became clear that Kavanaugh knew all along that Foster had committed suicide, and that he had used the power and resources of the independent counsel’s office to lend credibility to vulgar sexual rumors about the first lady, in the process needlessly torturing the family of a dead man.
Let’s just say there is more than one way to assault someone. In this case, which is proven, he assaulted two women: Hillary Clinton and Vince Foster’s widow, Elizabeth.
As of this writing, we don’t know whether Republicans on the Judiciary Committee will delay Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote or reopen the hearings and call Christine Blasey Ford to testify. But if they are depending on their nominee’s reputation as an upstanding, honest, decent adult to outweigh this accusation of sexual assault in high school, they are going to have to find another candidate for the seat.
As Sen. Brian Schatz said in the quote above, Brett Kavanaugh is not just another conservative jurist. He is a professional political operative with a past full of dirty tricks and character assassination. If there is any decency left in the Republican Party this latest revelation will be the straw that breaks the camel’s back.
Republican officials say privately that the performance of the economy under Mr. Trump has not been a major motivating factor for pro-Trump voters. For some Americans on the right, it may even be contributing to the mood of political apathy that has so alarmed G.O.P. leaders, since voters who are optimistic rarely vote with the intensity of those who are angry or afraid.
America First Action, a political committee aligned with Mr. Trump, conducted a series of focus groups over the summer and concluded the party had a severe voter-turnout problem, brought on in part by contentment about the economy and a refusal by Republicans to believe that Democrats could actually win the midterm elections.
Conservative-leaning voters in the study routinely dismissed the possibility of a Democratic wave election, with some describing the prospect as “fake news,” said an official familiar with the research, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the data was not intended to be disclosed. Breaking that attitude of complacency is now the Republicans’ top priority, far more than wooing moderates with gentler messaging about economic growth.
Don’t worry. If they lose, they’ll just say it was rigged and they’ll be happy to have something else to bitch and whine about which is what they really love.
Donald Trump ought to like hurricanes. They upend pretty much everything and bring chaos to millions of lives. Very Trumpian. It’s their public cost that makes them unattractive, probably, plus the mess, discomfort, and disruption of tee times. Hurricanes are indiscriminate in their destruction. Trump is more selective in his wrath and more predictable.
Waiting all week for Florence to creep slowly into these parts was like watching paint dry. Waiting this morning for Trump to rage-tweet about Hillary Clinton’s post last night in The Atlantic feels comparable. Maybe no one has yet read him the quote about “the unspeakable cruelty” of his treatment of families and children at the border. Maybe no one dares tell him she wrote of his “monstrous neglect of Puerto Rico” where (he denies) 3,000 died from the effects of Hurricane Maria and his administration’s failed response.
But like Florence arriving, Trump’s blowup is just a matter of waiting. Tweets so far this morning are boilerplate boasts about the economy.
Clinton has, like Obama before her, taken her time about speaking out so forcefully about the Trump presidency. Last night she bluntly and deliberately described his presidency as a crisis for democracy.
It is an assault on the rule of law. It casts doubt on the legitimacy of our elections. Trump is waging “a war on truth and reason.” His administration’s corruption is “breathtaking.” Perhaps worst, he is undermining the national cohesiveness that makes democracy itself possible.
An attorney herself, Clinton builds her case point by point.
But Trump is a symptom, not the cause, of the authoritarianism threatening the country, Clinton writes:
Over many years, our defenses were worn down by a small group of right-wing billionaires—people like the Mercer family and Charles and David Koch—who spent a lot of time and money building an alternative reality where science is denied, lies masquerade as truth, and paranoia flourishes. By undermining the common factual framework that allows a free people to deliberate together and make the important decisions of self-governance, they opened the way for the infection of Russian propaganda and Trumpian lies to take hold. They’ve used their money and influence to capture our political system, impose a right-wing agenda, and disenfranchise millions of Americans.
They have pursued the kind of antidemocratic, “unregulated, predatory capitalism” that has created massive “economic inequality and corporate monopoly power” inimical to the American way of life. Politics has become a blood sport.
There is a tendency, when talking about these things, to wring our hands about “both sides.” But the truth is that this is not a symmetrical problem. We should be clear about this: The increasing radicalism and irresponsibility of the Republican Party, including decades of demeaning government, demonizing Democrats, and debasing norms, is what gave us Donald Trump. Whether it was abusing the filibuster and stealing a Supreme Court seat, gerrymandering congressional districts to disenfranchise African Americans, or muzzling government climate scientists, Republicans were undermining American democracy long before Trump made it to the Oval Office.
Now we must do all we can to save our democracy and heal our body politic.
For healing the body politic, we will need to pursue the kind of ethical reforms put in place after Nixon resigned, Clinton continues, as well as election reforms and reinforcement of voting protections.
Checks on corporate power that help reduce inequality are also needed. That last is a job better left to Elizabeth Warren. The Clintons’ time in the White House helped accelerate rather than brake wealth concentration and corporate consolidation.
And ultimately, healing our country will come down to each of us, as citizens and individuals, doing the work—trying to reach across divides of race, class, and politics and see through the eyes of people very different from ourselves. When we think about politics and judge our leaders, we can’t just ask, “Am I better off than I was four years ago?” We have to ask, “Are we better off? Are we as a country better, stronger, and fairer?” Democracy works only when we accept that we’re all in this together.
That last is perhaps the most anti-Trump sentiment in Clinton’s post. For all the patriotic bluster, veneration of the founders, and public reverence for the country’s founding documents, it has long been obvious many on the right break faith with the U.S. Constitution after the first three words in it. There is no “we” in their America, nor in Trump’s. There is only “I” and “me.”
* * * * * * * * *
For The Win 2018 is ready for download. Request a copy of my county-level election mechanics primer at tom.bluecentury at gmail.
I’d like to think this will be the final recapitulation of the 2016 electorate but I have a feeling people will still be analyzing it long after I’m in the grave. And I guess that makes sense. After all, our electoral system produced a totally unqualified alien from outer space.
Two years after the 2016 election, there has been no single answer to the question: What happened? In an outcome that saw the popular vote and the electoral college diverge, theories abound, opinions are many and consensus fleeting. Now, a trio of political scientists have come forth with their answer as to why Donald Trump prevailed over Hillary Clinton, summed up in the title of their forthcoming book: “Identity Crisis.”
The co-authors are John Sides of George Washington University, Michael Tesler of the University of California at Irvine and Lynn Vavreck of the University of California at Los Angeles. They have plumbed and analyzed a wealth of polling and voting data, examined surveys of attitudes taken long before, during and after the 2016 campaign. Their conclusion is straightforward. Issues of identity — race, religion, gender and ethnicity — and not economics were the driving forces that determined how people voted, particularly white voters.
In an election decided by fewer than 80,000 votes in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, it’s been common for people to say that anything or everything could have made the difference. The three political scientists beg to differ: “ ‘Everything’ did not ‘matter’ equally,” they argue.
They are believers in the fundamentals of elections — things such as economic conditions, presidential approval, partisanship and the like. Fundamentals predicted that Clinton would win a greater share of the two-party vote, which she did. They dismiss some theories about what happened: If 2016 was really about anger and change, why did Clinton win the popular vote? Clinton’s popular vote victory, they note, was not in line with “casual punditry about voter anger but was in line with the state of the economy and approval of Barack Obama.”
They question other theories: They doubt, for example, that Russian interference determined the outcome of the election. The release of hacked emails in July and October 2016 “did not clearly affect” Clinton’s favorable ratings nor perceptions of her honesty, they write. They also say that, given the billions of tweets and social media postings during the campaign, Russian content was probably only an infinitesimal share of the total. Claims that the Russians turned the election should be greeted “with something between agnosticism and skepticism — and probably leaning toward skepticism,” they say.
But if some things were predictable, based on fundamentals, other things that happened were not. One was the unusual pattern of shifts among the states between 2012 and 2016. Normally, from election to election, states move in the same direction, albeit by different percentages. From 2008 to 2012, “almost every state shifted in the direction of the Republican candidate” due to economic conditions that were unfavorable to Obama.
In 2016, Clinton should have done a bit worse than Obama across the board. Instead, in some states — Arizona, California, Georgia, Massachusetts and Texas — she did better. In others she did about the same. And in some, Ohio and Iowa among them, she did “substantially worse.”
Oddly, she did better, comparatively, in red states — such as Georgia and Texas — than she did in a swing state like Iowa.
The cause for this was a divide among white voters, well documented during and since the election, a division that saw those with college degrees moving one way and those without college degrees the other. Sides, Tesler and Vavreck go step by step through the reasons for what they call the “diploma divide” among white voters.
There were some white supporters of Obama whose views on race and immigration were “out of step” with where the Democratic Party stood on those issues. The fact that the campaign focused on these issues — largely due to Trump’s rhetoric and consistency — voters’ perceptions of where the two candidates stood on identity issues was “further apart . . . than any major-party presidential candidates in 40 years.” Which, in turn, meant that those issues “became more strongly related to how they voted in 2016 than in any recent presidential election.”
It’s not that economic issues didn’t matter. But racial attitudes “shaped the way voters understood economic outcomes.” The authors describe this as “racialized economics” rather than economic anxiety. “Voters’ attitudes on racial issues accounted for the ‘diploma divide’ between less and better educated whites,” they write. “Economic anxiety did not.”
Their conclusion agrees with that of Alan Abramowitz, a political scientist at Emory University, who has long studied the rise of polarization in American politics and who focuses on racial resentment in his recent book, “The Great Alignment: Race, Party Transformation and the Rise of Donald Trump.”
Sides, Tesler and Vavreck reached their conclusion by highlighting data that show how identity issues became more important among white voters than in the past. What gives them confidence in their conclusion is that there were no similar signs in how economic issues affected white voters. They found “generally weak relationships between these measures of economic anxiety and how people voted in 2012 or 2016. Moreover, these relationships were not consistently stronger in 2016 than in 2012.”
Their definition of racialized economics is this: “the belief that undeserving groups are getting ahead while your group is left behind.” They say Trump played on these concerns throughout his campaign and has done so as president. They say “racialized economics” was more significant than economic anxiety in affecting how whites with different levels of education voted.
“These threads tell a straightforward story,” the authors write. The campaign focused on issues of identity more so than in the past. Trump and Clinton differed significantly on these issues, which activated them as important factors in shaping voting decisions. Additionally, there were many Obama voters whose views on these issues were “closer to Trump’s than to Obama’s or Clinton’s,” and many of them resided in battleground states. Their shift gave Trump primacy in the electoral college even as he was losing the popular vote.
The polarization around these issues predated Trump, but his campaign “magnified this polarization.” Sides, Tesler and Vavreck conclude the chapter on what happened by noting that the 2016 election was distinguished not only for the fact that Trump prevailed in the face of so many predictions that he would never be elected president, but also “for how it crystallized the country’s identity crisis: sharp divisions on what America has become and what it should be.”
They argue that the current “identity crisis” in America cannot easily be undone, even though public opinion “contains reservoirs of sentiment that can serve both to unify and divide.” The 2016 election did not produce the divisions in America, but it has embedded them deeper into the politics of the country. Voters and candidates will decide in coming elections whether to move in a different direction.
I think most of us understood Trump’s appeal to be largely based on the blaring bullhorn racial appeals of his campaign, couched in economics or not. (A lot of it was just straight up racism — the blacks and to foreigners are doming to kill you! Runferyer lives!) It’s not as if any of this it was hidden. It’s just that everyone was already primed to talk economics after the Obama years in which the economy was front and center and they missed that other factors were back in play.
During the crisis all many of these folks cared about was that the government was going to do something to help them. They turned to the Democrats because that’s the only rational choice in such a situation. But it was inevitable that once the economy started to recover and people found their normal bearings again, some would revert to their old thinking about who “deserved” government help and who didn’t.
The good news is that the fact that Clinton was the first woman nominee in the history of the United States had absolutely nothing to do with any of this. It’s not as if any of those non-college educated Obama-Trump voters might have had antediluvian views about traditional gender roles (which we all know has absolutely nothing to do with “identity.”) So at least we don’t have to worry about that. Whew!
We’ve got a race on our hands,” Cruz said. “If you’re a wealthy liberal sitting in New York City or Massachusetts or San Francisco right now and you could defeat one Republican in the country, it’d be me, that’s why the money is flowing in here.”
President Trump has pledged to come campaign for Cruz, something the conservative lawmaker welcomes. President Trump is also driving Democratic energy, which Cruz says correlates to his stiff re-election effort.
“With the election of Donald Trump, the far left has lost their minds,” Cruz said. “The extreme left, they are energized, they’re angry and they have a lot of hatred for President Trump.”
[…]
The 45-year-old O’Rourke has been likened to “The next Obama,” by Esquire and “Kennedyesque” by Vanity Fair, and Cruz believes positive press like that encourages out-of-state Democratic donors.
“Their favorite adjective is Kennedyesque,” Cruz said. “They all talk about his hair and his teeth, they talk about no substance, nothing about his record, they don’t talk about his being open to abolishing [Immigration and Customs Enforcement], they don’t talk about his wanting to impeach the president.”
Protesters voiced their anger on Saturday as Steve Bannon took part in a controversial live debate in which he defended far-right political figures in Italy and Hungary.
Speaking in New York at the Open Future festival organised by the Economist, Donald Trump’s former aide hailed Matteo Salvini, Italy’s deputy prime minister, and Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s nationalist prime minister, for attempting to protect the “sovereignty of their country”.
As Bannon was interviewed in front of a live London audience via video link by Zanny Minton Beddoes, the magazine’s editor-in-chief, protesters at the New York office vented their anger at what they saw as the promotion of extreme views. They held banners reading: “Don’t normalize Bannon!” and “Shame”.
“Of course media have to interview odious figures sometimes, and if it’s done with critical skill, that’s simply normal journalism,” Andrew Stroehlein, European media director of Human Rights Watch, said on Twitter. “But media do not have to put an odious figure on stage, advertise him, & sell tickets to see him. @TheEconomist’s #OpenFuture is the latter. In short, white nationalism is not entertainment.”
Less than two weeks ago a scheduled appearance by Bannon at the New Yorker festival was swiftly cancelled following a backlash. The editor of the New Yorker, David Remnick, had announced that he would interview Bannon in front of a live audience with “every intention of asking him difficult questions”.
The Hollywood figures Jim Carrey, John Mulaney, Patton Oswalt and Judd Apatow were among those who warned on social media that they would withdraw from the event if Bannon also appeared.
Bannon’s appearance at the London festival, held to mark the 175th anniversary of the Economist, was also criticised by some, with the musician Emmy the Great withdrawing from the event explaining that she was “worried that not speaking up would be inaction that I would regret later in life, after his [Bannon’s] dangerous ideas had proliferated further”.
Another to pull out was the lawyer and social activist Mónica Ramírez, who said: “Power comes in many forms and can be exercised in a multitude of ways. Among these, power resides in the ability to decide when to speak, where to speak and with whom we speak alongside.”
At the event Bannon refused to call Orbán, who has described refugees as “Muslim invaders”, and Salvini, who has cracked down on migrants, as racist. “These people are trying to make their countries better. I certainly do not condemn Viktor Orbán and Salvini,” he said.
“I absolutely do not condemn Orbán or what Salvini is doing, these individuals, these populist national movements across Europe, are trying to get the sovereignties of their countries back.”
There was a mixed reaction from those watching. Anil Dash said: “The only true thing Bannon said on stage is that he seeks to get his ideas out there and convert young people to his beliefs, and he got a platform to do exactly that.” But Tony Wan, managing editor at the US education technology firm Edsurge, tweeted: “Bannon really had no sensible responses, mostly finger pointing, blame … and a WTF grasp of history.”
These people are massively overestimating Bannon’s potential followers’ desire for coherence and competence. They are looking for validation and endorsement of their feelings and a good demagogue knows how to do that. That’s what Bannon and all of his white nationalist allies are doing. Thinking you can “beat” them with logical arguments is really missing the point.
Earlier this summer, Christine Blasey Ford wrote a confidential letter to a senior Democratic lawmaker alleging that Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her more than three decades ago, when they were high school students in suburban Maryland. Since Wednesday, she has watched as that bare-bones version of her story became public without her name or her consent, drawing a blanket denial from Kavanaugh and roiling a nomination that just days ago seemed all but certain to succeed.
Now, Ford has decided that if her story is going to be told, she wants to be the one to tell it.
Speaking publicly for the first time, Ford said that one summer in the early 1980s, Kavanaugh and a friend — both “stumbling drunk,” Ford alleges — corralled her into a bedroom during a gathering of teenagers at a house in Montgomery County.
While his friend watched, she said, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers and clumsily attempting to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it. When she tried to scream, she said, he put his hand over her mouth.
“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” said Ford, now a 51-year-old research psychologist in northern California. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.”
Ford said she was able to escape when Kavanaugh’s friend and classmate at Georgetown Preparatory School, Mark Judge, jumped on top of them, sending all three tumbling. She said she ran from the room, briefly locked herself in a bathroom and then fled the house.
Ford said she told no one of the incident in any detail until 2012, when she was in couples therapy with her husband. The therapist’s notes, portions of which were provided by Ford and reviewed by The Washington Post, do not mention Kavanaugh’s name but say she reported that she was attacked by students “from an elitist boys’ school” who went on to become “highly respected and high-ranking members of society in Washington.” The notes say four boys were involved, a discrepancy Ford says was an error on the therapist’s part. Ford said there were four boys at the party but only two in the room.
Notes from an individual therapy session the following year, when she was being treated for what she says have been long-term effects of the incident, show Ford described a “rape attempt” in her late teens.
In an interview, her husband, Russell Ford, said that in the 2012 sessions, she recounted being trapped in a room with two drunken boys, one of whom pinned her to a bed, molested her and prevented her from screaming. He said he recalled that his wife used Kavanaugh’s last name and voiced concern that Kavanaugh — then a federal judge — might one day be nominated to the Supreme Court.
On Sunday, the White House sent The Post a statement Kavanaugh issued last week, when the outlines of Ford’s account first became public: “I categorically and unequivocally deny this allegation. I did not do this back in high school or at any time.”
Through a White House spokesman, Kavanaugh declined to comment further on Ford’s allegation and did not respond to questions about whether he knew her during high school. The White House had no additional comment.
Judge did not respond to emails seeking comment, and efforts to locate a phone number or address for him were unsuccessful. In an interview Friday with The Weekly Standard, before Ford’s name was known, he denied that any such incident occurred. “It’s just absolutely nuts. I never saw Brett act that way,” Judge said. He told the New York Times that Kavanaugh was a “brilliant student” who loved sports and was not “into anything crazy or illegal.”
Uh huh:
In his senior-class yearbook entry at Georgetown Prep, Kavanaugh made several references to drinking, claiming membership to the “Beach Week Ralph Club” and “Keg City Club.” He and Judge are pictured together at the beach in a photo in the yearbook.
Judge is a filmmaker and author who has written for the Daily Caller, The Weekly Standard and The Washington Post. He chronicled his recovery from alcoholism in “Wasted: Tales of a Gen-X Drunk,” which described his own black-out drinking and a culture of partying among students at his high school, renamed in the book “Loyola Prep.” Kavanaugh is not mentioned in the book, but a passage about partying at the beach one summer makes glancing reference to a “Bart O’Kavanaugh,” who “puked in someone’s car the other night” and “passed out on his way back from a party.”
I would just remind people who are thinking that Kavanaugh shouldn’t be denied a place on the Supreme Court because of things he did in high school, that his professional life hasn’t been exactly staid and upright either:
In early 1995, Brett Kavanaugh, a rising star in conservative legal circles, wrestled with one of the most inflammatory questions of the Clinton presidency: How did White House deputy counsel Vincent Foster die?
It was an early career challenge for the man now nominated by President Trump to the Supreme Court. And it spurred him to advocate for an aggressive investigation related to the president, something he now cautions against.
Kavanaugh’s revised thinking, as reflected in a 2009 law journal article, is that civil and criminal investigations “take the President’s focus away from his or her responsibilities to the people.” His argument has been cited as a factor that appealed to President Trump as he faced a Supreme Court vacancy while dealing with an ongoing special counsel’s investigation into Russian election interference.
In early 1995, however, Kavanaugh offered his boss, independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr, the legal rationale for expanding his investigation of the Arkansas financial dealings of President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, to include the Foster death, according to a memo he wrote on March 24, 1995.
Kavanaugh, then 30, argued that unsupported allegations that Foster may have been murdered gave Starr the right to probe the matter more deeply. Foster’s death had already been the focus of two investigations, both concluding that Foster committed suicide.
Kavanaugh in 2004: Not ‘appropriate’ to give views on Clinton impeachment
“We are currently investigating Vincent Foster’s death to determine, among other things, whether he was murdered in violation of federal criminal law,” Kavanaugh wrote to Starr and six other officials in a memo offering legal justification for the probe. “[I]t necessarily follows that we must have the authority to fully investigate Foster’s death.”
The four-page memo, obtained by The Washington Post from the Library of Congress, sheds light on how Kavanaugh’s thinking evolved on the legal rights of sitting presidents.
His handling of Starr’s Foster probe helped elevate Kavanaugh’s career, but the lengthy inquiry enabled conspiracy theories to flourish and add to the tumult of the Clinton presidency. Once the Foster matter was closed, Starr’s office continued to investigate the Clintons and eventually veered into the president’s relationship with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
Kavanaugh pursued the Foster inquiry at Starr’s request, even though he and others in the office soon came to believe that Foster killed himself, according to two people who worked with him at the time. Ultimately, Kavanaugh’s report in October 1997 affirmed earlier findings of suicide. The Foster component of Starr’s investigation cost about $2 million and lasted three years.
Foster’s family expressed outrage that the Starr investigation enabled conspiracy theorists to “allow the American people to entertain any thought that the president of the United States somehow had complicity in Vince’s death,” Sheila Foster Anthony, Foster’s sister, said the day the findings were released. She did not respond to a request for comment.
He’s changed his mind about investigating presidents now, of course. He can be counted upon to protect his patron Donald Trump. That’s because he isn’t a learned jurist, he’s a slash and burn right-wing activist. Drunken, privileged, rich boys are exactly the types they recruited for their dirty work during that period. And he’s exactly the type the wingnut cabal that’s propping up Trump to get the courts packed would put forth to ensure that their agenda is protected by any means necessary. He’s a partisan hitman, not a judge.
There are many horrible right-wing judges out there to choose from, most of whom will be just as bad as Kavanaugh in a dozen different ways. But this guy is wrong on a different level. He is a professional character assassin who is deeply morally compromised. His cruel and indecent behavior toward Vince Foster’s family alone, despite knowing that it was wrong, disqualified him. This latest revelation just reinforces what we already know.
He is a moral abomination who has no place on the court.
Update: I forgot to mention all this stuff about Kavanaugh’s time as a clerk to Judge Alex Kozinski, who turns out to have been a truly outrageous sexual harasser. Kavanaugh says he didn’t see a thing wrong.
If you’re wondering why the Special Counsel laid out such a long and detailed list of charges that in Manafort’s plea deal last Friday, Emptywheel has a good theory.
They’re there to show what Paul Manafort does when he’s running a campaign.
Because they show that for the decade leading up to running Trump’s campaign, Manafort was using the very same sleazy strategy to support Viktor Yanukovych that he used to get Trump elected.
In other words, these exhibits are a preview of coming attractions.
TAKE OUT THE FEMALE OPPONENT BY PROSECUTING HER
The criminal information provided far more detail about something we had only seen snippets of in the Alex Van der Zwaan plea: Manafort’s use of Skadden Arps to whitewash Yanukovych’s prosecution of Yulia Tymoshenko.
It describes how Manafort used cut-outs to place stories claiming his client’s female opponent had murdered someone. And it shows Manafort seeding lies that his client’s female opponent had criminal intent when he knew there was no proof to back the claim.
MANAFORT took other measures to keep the Ukraine lobbying as secret as possible. For example, MANAFORT, in written communications on or about May 16, 2013, directed his lobbyists (including Persons D1 and D2, who worked for Company D) to write and disseminate within the United States news stories that alleged that Tymoshenko had paid for the murder of a Ukrainian official. MANAFORT stated that it should be “push[ed]” “[w]ith no fingerprints.” “It is very important we have no connection.” MANAFORT stated that “[m]y goal is to plant some stink on Tymo.”
MANAFORT directed lobbyists to tout the report as showing that President Yanukovych had not selectively prosecuted Tymoshenko. But in November 2012 MANAFORT had been told privately in writing by the law firm that the evidence of Tymoshenko’s criminal intent “is virtually non-existent” and that it was unclear even among legal experts that Tymoshenko lacked power to engage in the conduct central to the Ukraine criminal case. These facts, known by MANAFORT, were not disclosed to the public.
This propaganda effort against Manafort’s client’s female opponent included placing stories in Breitbart.
SANCTIONS WILL BACKFIRE
Manafort placed so much effort on inventing stories about Tymoshenko in part to take her out as a political opponent (and to create an opportunity to pitch Yanukovych’s corruption as a tolerable partner to Europe). But he did so, too, to undermine support for sanctions against Yanukovych for human rights abuses, of which Tymoshenko was the poster child. Particularly after John Kerry replaced Hillary, Manafort undermined sanctions by promising raw material exploitation opportunities.
We’ll learn more about what role Manafort himself played in Trump’s policy on sanctions (even aside from any quid pro quo that may have come out of the June 9 Trump Tower meeting), but we know that Trump’s view on sanctions is among the questions Mueller wants to ask Trump, and we know that in an op-ed encouraged by the Trump campaign (and highlighted to Ivan Timofeev), George Papadopoulos argued that sanctions had hurt the US.
OBAMA LOST UKRAINE
Manafort was even using some of the very same lines that Trump still uses, such as blaming Obama for “losing” Ukraine.
ELECTORAL IRREGULARITIES ARE MY OPPONENTS’ FAULT
Shortly after Yanukovych won in 2010, Manafort boasted that he had established a baseline to be able to claim that Tymoshenko’s complaints about election irregularities were disinformation.
Manafort also prepared a full court press to influence the electoral observers in advance of Ukraine’s 2012 parliamentary election (this document, at PDF 5, is dated as October 9, 2012 in the
One thing we’re going to see in former Manafort partner Roger Stone’s eventual indictment is a focus on the work of his Stop the Steal PAC, both just after Manafort arrived to manage the Convention, and his voter suppression efforts (which paralleled Russian ones) during the general election.
HILLARY CLINTON IS THE ENEMY
Finally, as early as February 2013 (see PDF 14), Paul Manafort was advising his client that replacing Hillary Clinton with someone who would value raw material deals over human rights would be a positive development.
As it happens, in 2016, Paul Manafort could please all his clients by offering a man who valued raw material deals over human rights as a positive development.
I wrote about the similarities between the Yanukovych and Trump campaigns against Clinton Tymoschenko. In Ukraine they actually “locked her up” for a while. This is much more detailed.
Click over to Emptywheel to see all the detail she’s amassed, various documents and video to illustrate this narrative.
