Trump Ran A Catch-And-Kill For Brett Kavanaugh
We all watched it happen, and it’s now confirmed, again.
Welp, guess this is not shocking. According to a new report from Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island), Trump was running a little catch-and-kill operation to shush up any potential witnesses to Brett Kavanaugh’s grossitudes back in the day.
Remember that awful time Brett Kavanaugh got confirmed to the Supreme Court six years ago? If you’re still trying to forget, skip this article!
The year was 2018, and soon after President Donald J. Trump nominated Kavanaugh, Christine Blasey Ford came forward to say that he had groped her and tried to take her clothes off at a high school party. Then other skeevy and disgusting stories started coming out from Kavanaugh’s time at Yale, involving him being an aggressive, puking drunk; waggling his weenus at a freshman then shoving it in her face and demanding she “kiss it”; belonging to a fraternity with the slogan “No means yes, yes means anal,” and belonging to a Yalie secret society that was nicknamed “tit and clit.”
Classmates said his group of friends “treated women like meat,” were like “Lord of the Flies,” and plied women with “jungle juice” to try to take advantage of them. There was that yearbook page, with the boofing, and the devil’s triangle. Yeah, you remember.
As more stories about the guy’s party-hog lifestyle at his molto costoso private high school and in college kept popping up, then-President Trump — who, as we were later to learn, dabbled in a bit of rape himself — promised that the FBI would have “free rein” to “to interview whoever they deem appropriate.” For one whole week! Then he proceeded to mock Ford at his rallies. “How did you get home? I don’t remember. How did you get there? I don’t remember. Where was the place? I don’t remember.” He lamented that the poor bro’s life was now “in tatters.”
But it was not! Kavanaugh showed up to his confirmation hearing and wept about his beautiful calendars, which showed that on July 1, 1982, he had been at Tobin’s house doing a football workout with Ernie, Tim, Squee, and Donkey Dong Doug or whoever, which somehow proved that he could not have assaulted Ford. Then he snarled about how he liked beer, and ultimately he was confirmed to the bench. Where he went on to help overturn Roe v. Wade — and, just yesterday, to thumbs-up Texas letting women die of pregnancy complications before offering an abortion in emergency rooms. Actually, meat would probably get treated better, because you don’t want your meat tainted with sepsis.
Lamented a corroborating witness, Deborah Ramirez, in 2018: “What does it mean, that this person has a role in defining women’s rights in our future?” Worse things than we even imagined at the time, as it turned out.
It was Ford’s life that got tattered, actually. She and her family had to hire around-the-clock security after a barrage of death threats, and move around from hotel to hotel. She still has security, and PTSD, to this day.
And so now we learn that the coverup was all even worse than it seemed at the time. The tips — 4,500 of them — got forwarded to the White House. And the FBI pursued NONE of them. The FBI was instructed by the White House to talk to 10 potential witnesses. And that’s it. They were not allowed to pursue any corroborating witnesses, even the dozens that lawyers for Blasey Ford and Ramirez had provided to the FBI.
“Assurances that everything was being done by the book and according to standard FBI procedures omitted the fact that for supplement background investigations, there is no book and there are no procedures,” Whitehouse lamented to the Washington Post. “You simply do what the White House tells you.”
And then the senators who voted to confirm Kavanaugh cited the lack of corroborating evidence as a reason to confirm him. It was an updated version of Trump’s old National Enquirer catch-and-kill maneuver, Supreme Court edition.
LIKE SO.
And just like dude’s old Yalie roommates, we all were forced to watch it happen. We had to sit there helplessly while justice made chucking noises and hovered over a tiny wastebasket, screaming, “OH NO, DON’T, STOP, THE TOILET IS OVER THERE! USE THE TOILET, THAT’S WHAT IT’S FOR!” And as egregious as it all was, there isn’t a lot to be done about it now. But at least we know we weren’t imagining things?
Anyway, here’s your obligatory Matt Damon.
[Washington Post gift link/ New Yorker]
For those of you in the back, THIS is weaponizing the Justice Department.
I thought (and still think) Kavanaugh's reaction was weird. The hostility. Someone who was really innocent, it seems to me, would say something like A) "Ma'am, I'm sorry, but I don't remember this happening at all. I'm not calling you a liar, but I really think it must have been someone else." Or (if something happened but was considerably less rapey than what she describes), B) "I remember that night. Christine, it was nothing like that. I don't know why you've invented all these details that never occurred."
But that's not how he acted, did he? He manufactured outrage. Just like Clarence Thomas.