In How We Know Kavanaugh Is Lying Nathan J. Robinson delivers an exhaustive treatise on the myriad lies of Brett Kavanaugh.
Jeff Flake has stated he will vote "No" if he is convinced that Kavanaugh lied during his testimony. Senator Flake need not wait for a sham FBI investigation to be completed. All he needs to do is read Robinson's article.
Near the end of this over 10,000 word refutation Robinson summarises:
What does it say about this country that this is the state of our discourse? That Kavanaugh even standsany chance of being made one of the most powerful figures in the American government, with control over life and liberty? That a man like this is even a judge? He went before the United States Senate and showed total contempt for his vow to tell the truth. He attempted to portray a highly esteemed doctor as a crazy person, by consistently misrepresenting the evidence. He treated the public like we were idiots, like we wouldn’t notice as he pretended he was ralphing during Beach Week from too many jalapeños, as he feigned ignorance about sex slang, as he misread his own meticulously-kept 1982 summer calendar, as he replied to questions about his drinking habits by talking about church, as he suggested there are no alcoholics at Yale, as he denied knowing who “Bart O’Kavanaugh” could possibly be based on, as he declared things refuted that weren’t actually refuted, as he claimed witnesses said things they didn’t say, as he failed to explain why nearly a dozen Yale classmates said he drank heavily, as he invented an imaginary drinking game to avoid admitting he had the mind of a sports jock in high school, as he said Ford had only accused him last week, as he responded to his roommate’s eyewitness statement with an incoherent story about furniture, as he pretended Bethesda wasn’t five miles wide, as he insisted Renate should be flattered by the ditty about how easy she was, as he declared that distinguished federal judges don’t commit sexual misconduct even though he had clerked for exactly such a judge.
And what does it say about us, and our political system, that he might well get away with it?
The substance of the article is a detailed a lawyerly dissection of Kavanaugh's testimony with many examples of baldface lies.
1. Kavanaugh says he never attended a gathering like the one Ford described:
Kavanaugh says that he never attended any event like this. Like what, though? He never attended a small gathering in Bethesda where people were drinking beer? Kavanaugh submitted his own calendars from the summer of 1982 into evidence for the Senate. As he said himself, “the calendars show a few weekday gatherings at friends’ houses after a workout or just to meet up and have some beers.” He says that he never attended a gathering like this, but that’s obviously false, because the type of gathering he says he did attend is exactly the kind she describes.
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Let’s look at the entry for July 1st, one Kavanaugh did notcite in his list of “parties with people who are not the people Ford cited.” On July 1st, Kavanaugh planned to go “to Timmy’s for skis w/Judge, Tom, PJ, Bernie, Squi.” There’s Mark Judge! There’s P.J.! So he gathered for [brew]skis with 2 of the 3 people Ford says she remembers being there. Small gathering? Beer? Judge, Brett, and P.J.? Check, check, and check. So when Kavanaugh says none of the gatherings on the calendar include the people Ford says, and implies that Ford was just conjuring names of people he would never gather with, that’s false. In fact, she cited a small gathering with P.J. and Judge before he released his calendar confirming it.
2. Kavanaugh says all witness accounts say it didn't happen:
KAVANAUGH: All the witnesses who were there say it didn’t happen. Ms. Keyser’s her longtime friend, said she never saw me at a party with or without Dr. Ford…
Do you notice something? THIS IS A BALD-FACED LIE. Keyser never said it “didn’t happen.” She said she didn’t remember being at a party with him and doesn’t know him. But in an interview with the Washington Post, Keyser said she believes Ford’s allegation. Keyser says she believes it happened, Kavanaugh tells the United States Senate that she said it didn’t.
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I want to dwell just a little longer on Kavanaugh’s statement that “all the witnesses” said it “didn’t happen.” Even Mark Judge, Kavanaugh’s close friend who allegedly participated in the assault, pulled a bit of a shady “don’t recall”: “I have no memory of this alleged incident. Brett Kavanaugh and I were friends in high school but I do not recall the party described in Dr. Ford’s letter. More to the point, I never saw Brett act in the manner Dr. Ford describes.” That last bit is a denial that Judge himself participated in or witnessed such an assault, but here’s P.J.:
“I am issuing this statement today to make it clear to all involved that I have no knowledge of the party in question; nor do I have any knowledge of the allegations of improper conduct she has leveled against Brett Kavanaugh.”
Kavanaugh says P.J. denied that the event happened. That’s not what the statement says. Kavanaugh is a federal judge, a real smart cookie. I hope he knows the difference between the absence of an awareness of an event and an awareness of the absence of an event.
3. Kavanaugh tries to imply the party could only have happened on a weekend because he only partied on weekends:
Kavanaugh quickly tries to restrict the range of possible dates to weekends, and on weekends he largely has alibis. “Presumably” this event happened on a weekend he says, because they were hard-working kids and drinking wouldn’t happen on a weeknight. But he actually has precisely such an event on his calendar! The July 1st brewski-evening with P.J., Judge, et al. happened on a Thursday, according to his own record. Kavanaugh tries to get people to avoid scrutinizing weekdays, by immediately “presuming” that this had to occur on a weekend, when he was—conveniently—frequently out of town. 1982 Kavanaugh has proven clearly that 2018 Kavanaugh is misleading the Senate about how he used to spend his weeknights.
4. Kavanaugh presents some strange map nonsense to confuse the issue which the article demonstrates is an absurd defense.
5. Robinson provides several examples of Kavanaugh not answering direct questions and instead lying about what an upstanding hard working kid he was:
Kavanaugh has not only denied engaging in abuse, but has rejected the entire idea of him as having been an excessive and rowdy drinker. In his testimony and his interview with FOX News, Kavanaugh portrayed himself as having been a shy, studious, churchgoing virgin who worked a summer job and focused on community service and team sports. Here’s an abbreviated version of an exchange with Patrick Leahy:
LEAHY: Now, you’ve talked about your yearbook. In your yearbook, you talked about drinking and sexual exploits, did you not?
KAVANAUGH: Senator, let me — let me take a step back and explain high school. I was number one in the class… [crosstalk]
LEAHY: I thought we were in the Senate […]
GRASSLEY: Let him answer. […]
KAVANAUGH: I’m going to talk about my high school record, if you’re going to sit here and mock me. […] I busted my butt in academics. I always tried to do the best I could. As I recall, I finished one in the class… I played sports. I was captain of the varsity basketball team. I was wide receiver and defensive back on the football team. I ran track in the spring of ’82 to try to get faster. I did my service projects at the school, which involved going to the soup kitchen downtown — let me finish — and going to tutor intellectually disabled kids at the Rockville Library. With the church — and, yes, we got together with our friends.
Leahy asks a straightforward question. In your high school yearbook, did you mention drinking and sexual exploits? Kavanaugh does not reply “Of course! I was a sports jock!” Instead, he replies “Let me tell you about my grades, and the times I volunteered at the library, with intellectually disabled kids.” You’ll notice that this (1) does not answer the question and is (2) incredibly fishy. If you ask someone “Were you a drinker?” and they reply “I went to church and helped children,” you are not dealing with a forthright person.
6. He gives several examples of Kavanaugh not answering direct questions about his drinking, and instead spouting lies:
His decision to present himself as squeaky clean, rather than wayward but subsequently redeemed, brings us to some of the most absurd untruths of Kavanaugh’s whole testimony. The evidence that he was more than an ordinary social drinker is voluminous. His yearbook lists him as treasurer of the “Keg City Club,” and his entry says “100 Kegs or Bust,” apparently referring to a “campaign by his friends to empty 100 kegs of beer during their senior year.” (Not a single senator asked him why his yearbook said “100 kegs or bust,” and the word “keg” doesn’t even appear in the hearing transcript.) It also says he was the “biggest contributor” to the Beach Week Ralph Club, which he admitted was a reference to vomiting. Here’s Liz Swisher, a Yale classmate of Kavanaugh’s who is now chief of the gynecologic oncology division at the University of Washington School of Medicine:
Brett was a sloppy drunk, and I know because I drank with him. I watched him drink more than a lot of people. He’d end up slurring his words, stumbling… There’s no medical way I can say that he was blacked out. . . . But it’s not credible for him to say that he has had no memory lapses in the nights that he drank to excess.
Here’s Daniel Livan, who lived in Kavanaugh’s dorm:
“I definitely saw him on multiple occasions stumbling drunk where he could not have rational control over his actions or clear recollection of them… His depiction of himself is inaccurate.”
James Roche, Kavanaugh’s freshman year roommate at Yale, says Kavanaugh was “frequently incoherently drunk,” and that “he became aggressive and belligerent” when he was drunk. Here’s Republican ex-pharmaceutical executive Lynn Brooks, another Yale classmate who roomed with Kavanaugh’s second accuser, Deborah Ramirez:
“He’s trying to paint himself as some kind of choir boy… You can’t lie your way onto the Supreme Court, and with [his self-description in the FOX interview], he’s gone too far. It’s about the integrity of that institution.”
7. He discusses the importance of his ridiculous answers about his yearbook.
Some Republicans tried to suggest that scrutiny of Kavanaugh’s yearbook was grasping at straws. Here we are trying to make sense of nonsense scrawlings from some silly kids in a musty old book. Here’s Lindsey Graham: “if we want to sit here and talk about whether a Supreme Court nomination should be based on a high school yearbook page, I think that’s taken us to a new level of absurdity.” But as with Ford’s allegation itself, what’s relevant is not just what happened then but what is happening now: Kavanaugh is lying. The evidence from the yearbook bears on the credibility of his statements about his character in high school, and Kavanaugh himself made his character a central part of his defense and his argument for why Ford should not be believed. Kavanaugh’s supporters can play dumb and suggest examining the yearbook is absurd, but being in the keg club and objectifying and demeaning women is evidence that his “I was always either at the soup kitchen or buried in my schoolbooks” defense is an act.
8. And, the totally unbelievable explanation for Renate Alumnius.
But then look at how Kavanaugh responds to the specific question. Blumenthal asks whether the reason Kavanaugh apologized to Renate was that the remark was not a tribute to a friend but a nasty innuendo. Kavanaugh replies by pointing out that Renate said they never had any sexual interaction, “so your question is false.” Then he becomes righteously indignant on Renate’s behalf, presenting himself as the protector of the woman about whom fellow members of the “Renate Aluminus” club said, let us recall: “You need a date / and it’s getting late / so don’t hesitate / to call Renate.”
Here, not only is Kavanaugh obviously lying, but he’s incredibly bad at it. He can’t give a plausible answer to the question, so he pivots to bluster. Remember, if you’re ever stuck up the creek without an argument, you can always launch into a grandiloquent “HOW DARE YOU.”
Robinson goes on to contrast how believable Ford's testimony was and to debunk the notion of a standard of proof required to reject Kavanaugh:
The primary Republican argument is that Ford cannot prove it, but it is very hard to prove a crime like this. I’m mainly interested, though, in showing that Kavanaugh isn’t telling the truth. Not because I am unfairly giving him higher scrutiny, but because he’s the one being considered for the Supreme Court, and if he’s lying, that should be the end of the issue as far as the Senate is concerned. Out he goes!
I hope the FBI investigation returns more evidence, but it is not necessary. We have enough already. Lying to Congress is a crime. It is punishable by five years in prison. Kavanaugh has lied repeatedly. He should not be confirmed.
It takes a while, but read this piece in its entirety. It is an excellent thorough and convincing exposition of the dishonesty of Brett Kavanaugh. It is more than enough for any fair minded person to conclude that this is not a person who should be allowed anywhere near the Supreme Court.