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Yet another round of evidence has come out suggesting that would-be Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh sought to mislead the Senate in his testimony last week, this time in the form of a 1983 letter Kavanaugh wrote arranging a Beach Week condo rental. It's at this point almost just piling on, but among the tidbits written in Kavanaugh's own hand:
• The postscript joking that someone should "warn the neighbors that we’re loud, obnoxious drunks with prolific pukers among us." In Senate testimony Kavanaugh insisted that teen references to "ralphing" referred not to drinking, but to, supposedly, spicy food. (No, we're not making that up.) But here the projection of much vomiting at his beach week party is quite clearly tied to alcohol, so Kavanaugh appears to have lied.
• "I think we are unanimous that any girls we can beg to stay there are welcomed with open ...." [sic]. This seems to go against Brett's image of himself as a teen entirely unoccupied with sex, if there's anyone on the planet who believed that in the first place.
• The letter is signed "FFFFF, Bart". Kavanaugh told the Senate that the "FFFFF" in his yearbook referred to a friend who stuttered when cursing. This is not an instance of the "FFFFF" being used as a stutter, but seems far more in line with the extremely crude sexual reference that the term meant in every other social context in which it has been used.
• Yes, Kavanaugh really signed the letter "Bart." When the Senate asked him whether references to a "Bart O'Kavanaugh" in close friend Mark Judge's autobiographical account of blackout high school drinking referred to him, Kavanaugh evaded the question. Kavanaugh did not offer the information that he, at the time, in actual letters, was using the nickname "Bart" himself.
These would-be trivialities are consequential primarily because Kavanaugh has defended himself from accusations of (multiple) sexual assaults with the insistence that he never, during the periods in question, drank to the point where such behavior would be possible. Instead we have learned from numerous classmates that he was a belligerent, aggressive binge drinker who was likely too impaired to control or remember his actions on numerous occasions; his primary rebuttal to sexual assault allegations against him is clearly and demonstrably untrue.
The New York Times also uncovered an underground high school newspaper written by friend Judge referring, in crude terms, to the supposed promiscuousness of Holton-Arms girls; Kavanaugh suggested in his testimony that his school did not interact with theirs, another assertion disputed by multiple of his former classmates.
In other significant news, three of Kavanaugh's own former law clerks who signed a letter praising him to the Senate Judiciary Committee have written a new letter stating that they are "deeply troubled" by the allegations against him and "encouraged by the initiation of a formal FBI investigation, which we believe is warranted."
