Up until the eleventh hour, it looked as though Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court was sailing smoothly to the confirmation finish line. Then the Democrats reached deep, accusing the judge of sexual wrongdoing many proms ago.
Imagine the following scenario: You are on the verge of landing a job that you’ve been preparing for your whole life. You possess all of the necessary skills and qualifications and the interview has gone exceptionally well. Now it’s just a matter of waiting for that big telephone call. Then, like a bolt of lightning from a clear blue sky, a person you haven’t heard from in decades is publicly accusing you of ‘sexual assault.’ Suddenly, your entire life, not to mention job prospects, is turned upside down. Such is the ultimate power of sexually-charged accusations.
That is more or less the situation facing Brett Kavanaugh, 53, the federal appeals judge who Donald Trump nominated to fill the empty seat on the nine-member Supreme Court. Just days before the Senate Judiciary Committee was to vote on Kavanaugh’s confirmation, which appeared to be a done deal, Senator Dianne Feinstein unleashed a proverbial stink bomb, saying that a woman had sent her a letter, accusing Mr. Kavanaugh of sexual wrongdoing while the two were in high school some 36 years ago. The date stamp on that claim is only one of many suspicious details concerning the allegation.
The accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, wrote that during a house party in the early 1980s, Kavanaugh and his friend “tried to disrobe me in their highly inebriated state. With Kavanaugh's hand over my mouth I feared he may inadvertently kill me.”
Kavanaugh has denied the incident ever happened, but as David Harsanyi noted in The Federalist with regards to our manic #MeToo times, “If you’re a man, a single uncorroborated account that dates back to 1982 is all your political critics need to accuse you of attempted rape.”
Meanwhile, Blasey Ford’s own recollection of the incident is foggy at best. She cannot say how she got to the party and how she got home, she cannot even recall whose house she was at. In fact, Blasey Ford never discussed the incident - not even with her parents or friends - until 30 years later during a marriage therapy session with her husband. She claims to have mentioned the assault during that session, but the therapist's notes fail to make any mention of Kavanaugh. None of this automatically refutes her claims, of course, but it does pose some serious questions about the accuracy of her story.
And then there is the question as to why Senator Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, held onto Blasey Ford’s letter for nearly six weeks, finally disclosing the information to her colleagues just before the final buzzer. Why did Feinstein not reveal the existence of the letter in the course of the hearings when it could have been given the critical attention it deserved? We would be naive not to believe the reason had everything to do with politics.
Democrats understand that in the event that Brett Kavanaugh is confirmed, the Supreme Court will have entered a new era where conservative-leaning justices are the new majority. This will impact the legal landscape of the United States long into the future. In the words of Pat Buchanan, author and former presidential candidate, the Democrats are desperate “to derail Kavanaugh, lest his elevation to the high court imperil their agenda and the social revolution that [they] have been able to impose upon the nation…”
If the Democrats can eliminate Kavanaugh from consideration to the Court, it would force Trump to vet and nominate another candidate, a tedious process that would never be completed before the midterm elections in November. And this is the most likely explanation as to why sly Feinstein withheld Blasey Ford’s letter for so long: If the Democrats win the midterms, they would be in the position to continue playing spoiler against Trump’s future nominees for a long time.
There are other factors that make the Democrat's move look suspect. Many legal observers expressed surprise when US Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein made the unprecedented move of calling on the nation’s 93 federal prosecutors to help the Department of Justice review Kavanaugh's government documents. It has always been the responsibility of the DOJ’s own legal team to facilitate documents related to a Supreme Court nominee. In any case, it may speak volumes about Kavanaugh’s squeaky-clean background that, despite Rosenstein ordering a nationwide effort to dig up dirt on Trump’s nominee, the only thing they could uncover was a high school beer party.
And by the way, who exactly is Christine Blasey Ford, and why should we trust her account of an incident that occurred 36 years ago and apparently without a single witness to substantiate her claim?
As it turns out, Christine Blasey Ford, a professor at Palo Alto University in California, appears to have a strong interest in politics, and not of the sort connected to the Trump administration. She has donated funds to ActBlue, a nonprofit organization that supports Democratic Party candidates, according to The Wall Street Journal.
She also supported a campaign to halt the Trump administration’s alleged separation of migrant parents and their children at the US border. In other words, Blasey Ford is a card-carrying Democrat who has worked against at least some of the Trump administration’s programs. Whether that would motivate her, possibly at the encouragement of some third party, to cast aspersions on Brett Kavanaugh is a question lawmakers will be attempting to discern on Monday when Christine Blasey Ford is scheduled to appear before the Senate Committee.
It is important to keep in mind, as the recent #MeToo movement has demonstrated, and the even more recent “predator priest” scandal rocking the Catholic Church, that there seems to be no ‘expiration date’ when it comes to forwarding claims of sexual malfeasance. Whether a person was assaulted yesterday or 50 years ago does not reduce the severity of such crimes. In other words, Christine Blasey Ford’s story deserves to be heard, no less than does Mr. Kavanaugh’s.
While understanding that a claim of sexual wrongdoing is no light matter, it is not impossible to imagine that some people may be very tempted - with so much riding on the line - to forward injurious claims with the intent of destroying the reputation of an individual to advance one's own cause. If ever that were a possibility, now – with the American people more divided politically than ever before - is certainly the time.
At the time of writing, lawyers for Blasey Ford said their client would not appear before the Senate Judicial Committee until the FBI conducts an investigation into the incident. This sounds like yet another attempt to halt Kavanaugh’s confirmation, and yet more reason to demand the interview go forward on Monday as planned.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.