The FBI should simply use its independent professional judgment in looking further into allegations against Brett Kavanaugh.
That would be the good-faith procedure for abiding by the spirit and letter of U.S. Sen. Jeff Flake’s proposal to do a week’s additional background check of “limited scope.”
“Limited scope” should mean the accusations of sexual misconduct by three women — Christine Blasey Ford, Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick — and attendant matters, such as Kavanaugh’s truth-telling or lack thereof under oath to the Judiciary Committee last week. It should not be political control of witness lists.
For a while, and I’m not altogether convinced we’ve cleared the woods yet, the Trump White House and Senate Republicans did not appear to be acting reasonably or in good faith. They seemed determined not merely to limit, but to hamstring, the inquiry.
Donald Trump kept saying he wanted the FBI to have full discretion and for the FBI to engage in whatever inquiries the Senate Republican leadership wanted.
That was purposely self-contradicting, a designed Trumpian fog targeted to the vaguely superficial and uninformed of his base. The FBI had no discretion if it could ask only questions dictated by Kavanaugh’s protectors in the Senate, chiefly Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, whose very purpose in life seems to be having Kavanaugh confirmed before the weekend, no matter what he did, or who he is, or what the FBI might get onto.
According to The New York Times, the Senate leadership initially sent a short list of approved FBI interviewees to the White House, which then formally authorized the FBI additional inquiry but only of the people on the list.
To begin, the FBI was directed to talk only to Ford, Ramirez, but not Swetnick, and Mark Judge, including about Swetnick, and three other people listed by Ford as guests at the party from which she alleges the assault by Kavanaugh. She already had said they knew nothing because they were downstairs as the assault took place upstairs and she didn’t tell anyone anything.
Let’s say someone tipped the FBI that Judge had drunkenly told a girlfriend something that might be relevant. The FBI would not have been authorized to talk to that source or that girlfriend unless given supplemental permission by the White House.
And the professor in North Carolina who came forward over the weekend to say Kavanaugh lied to the Senate committee when he downplayed the extent of his college drinking … he was not on the interview list.
And former Yale classmates of Kavanaugh and Ramirez who want to share stories of circumstantial support for Ramirez … they’re not on the list and, as of Monday night, couldn’t get the FBI to let them make a statement under oath, according to stellar reporters for The New Yorker.
There was even a report that the FBI had been told by the White House not to bother Safeway for any employment records on Judge.
You might recall that Ford does not know when the assault she alleges took place, but does remember that, a few weeks after it, she was unnerved to run into Judge, who she said was in the room, as he worked at the local Safeway. She suggested examining employment records to see when he worked there.
Amid strong blowback on all of that from not only Senate Democrats, but Flake, the White House said Monday afternoon that it had told the FBI to do whatever it felt necessary.
That was the only credible way to proceed. We shall see.
McConnell predicts Democrats won’t be satisfied. That suggests he knows what the report will say. What he knows for sure is that it was a short inquiry, anyway, and that he made it shorter by wasting three days with his dictated limitation.
If the FBI report comes back without definitive new information, which is the likeliest outcome, then Kavanaugh goes to the Supreme Court with 51 Republican votes and maybe that of a Democrat or two up for re-election in a Trump state.
If the FBI should somehow find evidence supportive of Dr. Ford, then Kavanaugh’s unfitness would become not what he did then, but the categorical lie he tells now.
He might have said from the beginning: “I have no recollection of what Dr. Ford is accusing me of. But I’m not proud of how much I drank in those days and how I behaved or even might have behaved when a drunk juvenile. I don’t remember doing any such thing, and can’t imagine it, but she speaks very movingly and all I can say is that I’m sorry she endured such an ordeal, and, as a grown man for decades, I have never behaved even remotely that way, and never would, and am sickened that anyone ever would.”
In that case, the principle of human redemption probably would prevail. But not now.
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.