According to multiple news reports coming out of Senator Orrin Hatch’s office, the Utah Republican just met with Trump nominee for the US Supreme Court Brett Kavanaugh, who confidently told him that he was not at the house party described by his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, where she says he assaulted her and attempted to sexually violate her.
NEWS: @OrrinHatch just spoke to Kavanaugh and Kavaaugh denies being at the party in question per a Hatch aide.
Hatch told me kavanaugh is “honest” and “straightforward” and said after talkng to Kavanaugh the woman might be “mixed up”
— Leigh Ann Caldwell (@LACaldwellDC) September 17, 2018
The problem for Kavanaugh, of course, is that Ford never mentioned a date, time, or location for the party.
The full text, with obvious redactions, of her letter to Senator Dianne Feinstein is available at CNN, who did not receive a copy of the letter, but had the redacted version of it read to them.
In it, Ford recounts the participants, the partygoers, the “suburban Maryland area home” where it occurred, the act itself, and even the fact that she later saw the other man — not Kavanaugh, but Mark Judge, who has been defending the nominee — and that he was “extremely uncomfortable” around her after the fact.
Nowhere in her account does it give a date or an address or anything other than the Maryland area where the assault occurred.
Either Brett Kavanaugh is lying to the aging Utah Senator, which is likely based on accusations of him lying directly under oath during his confirmation hearings and decades ago before the Senate as well, or in his eagerness to defend Kavanaugh, the Utah Senator is lying about what the nominee told him.
The likelihood of remembering a specific party you didn’t attend more than three decades ago is more than a little suspect. Let’s hope that the Republicans who have now called for a delay in further action on the nomination stick to their principles and hold the vote over until the matter can be investigated.
For his part, President Trump has called for a “full process” of investigation, though he clearly has already concluded that the allegation is false. At a White House event on Monday, Trump said that the matter “should have been brought up long before” and that he was confident it would all “work out very well” for his SCOTUS candidate.
Featured image via screen capture
