Republican Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake has a few problems, not the least of which is that the FBI investigation he's hanging his Kavanaugh vote on is shaping up to be a total sham. Beyond that, there's this statement he made on CBS' 60 Minutes.
Q: If Judge Kavanaugh is shown to have lied to the Committee, nomination's over?
FLAKE: Oh yes.
Well, guess what, Mr. Flake? He. Lied. Repeatedly. So, so many lies. He lied during his 2004 hearing to become a D.C. Circuit court judge, then lied in his repeated 2006 hearing for the same job (which he then got), and continued lying in his initial hearing for Supreme Court confirmation last month. And they weren’t just lies, but actual perjury in sworn testimony to the Senate to be on the nation's two highest courts. Those lies are big. They're about the things that happened when he was in the Bush administration and was helping craft policies and push through partisan judges.
Torture. Illegal surveillance. Document theft. Pursuing a right-wing judicial agenda. These are the things we know he has lied about in sworn testimony, just on the basis of the very thin set of documents that have been made public. There are tens of thousands more—something like 93 percent of his Bush administration record—that Republicans are still covering up. The potential breadth and scope of his perjuries that remain hidden by this document cover-up is mind-boggling.
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And that was before Kavanaugh’s unhinged performance last week responding to Christine Blasey Ford's accusation that he assaulted her when they were in high school. In his opening statement we've got the assertion that this is a Democratic hit job "held in secret for weeks," waiting for the opportune moment to release it. It wasn't. Then he said "I never attended a gathering like the one Dr. Ford describes in her allegation." But what Ford described is exactly like what he had documented on his own calendar—his alibi. He said that he and Ford "did not travel in the same social circles." But she was hanging out/going out with his good friend "Squi," who showed up on that calendar more than a dozen times.
He said that Ford's allegation "is not mearly uncorroborated, it is refuted by the very people she says were there, including by a long-time friend of hers. Refuted." None of them refuted the allegations. They said they didn't recall a gathering as described, and her friend—Leland Kayser—says she didn't remember the party but wholly believes Ford's account. In his statement, Kavanaugh tries to set new parameters for allegations, saying it "presumably happened on a weekend because I believed everyone worked and had jobs in the summers. […] a drunken early evening event of the kind she describes, presumably happened on a weekend." He was out of town on weekends, he says, so it couldn't have been him. Except Ford never said anything about what night of the week it occurred and that pesky calendar of his again shows gatherings on weeknights. Like the July 1 entry in which Kavanaugh recorded the same people Ford remembers being present hanging out and drinking "skis."
Then there's the underaged drinking that he lied about in his pre-hearing appearance on Fox News. He implied again that he was a legal high school senior drinking at the time: "The drinking age was 18 in Maryland for most of my time in high school, and was 18 in D.C. for all of my time in high school." The drinking age in Maryland changed to 21 on July 1, 1982. That night he was hanging out with the gang drinking "skis." He was 17 that night. Seriously, even Trump isn't buying any of his stories on his teenaged boozing. "He did have difficulty as a young man with drink," Trump said Monday morning.
Then there's the yearbook—lordy, the yearbook. From the "Renate Alumnius" references he and his friends scattered throughout the yearbook, clearly smearing a friend as sexually promiscous (which is certainly how the woman involved views it now) to the made-up definitions for sex acts like "Devil's Triangle" (it is not a drinking game) and "boofing" (it is not flatulence) and "ralphing" because of a stomach that can't handle spicy food, Kavanaugh lied. He lied about how he got into Yale, when he said he had no connections and got there by "busting his tail." His grandfather attended Yale. Kavanaugh was a legacy admission. On that, and on so much more, he flat-out lied.
What we learned in all these hours of testimony from Kavanaugh is that he cannot NOT lie. He's lied on really big stuff. He's lied on really little stuff. He's gone out of his way to lie about things that are easily disproved, like the drinking age in Maryland. Or emails that came from his very own White House email account. When cornered, when questioned, or when challenged he either lies or he becomes belligerent and bullying, like when he attacked Sen. Amy Klobuchar for her questioning on his alcohol use.
Kavanaugh's need to lie is bordering on pathological. We don't need an FBI investigation to show that. Jeff Flake doesn't need an FBI investigation to discover it. He watched it with his own eyes. If he doesn't believe his own eyes, then clearly he's not acting in good faith.