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Brett Kavanaugh's written explanations to senators about his personal finances and that $200,000 credit card debt contradict the White House's implausible explanation that it was all about baseball. They also leave the big question hanging: just how did he pay all that debt off last year.
The financial disclosure forms provided by Kavanaugh showed that for the 12 years before his nomination, he had tens of thousands of dollars in fluctuating credit card balances as well as a large loan against his retirement account, debt that magically disappeared in 2017. Nothing in the disclosures or in Kavanaugh's answers to Democratic senators' questions about those disclosures reveals where he got the money to clear his debt. But they do contradict the White Houses' baseball ticket story. The White House said he was buying season tickets for a group of friends, and that's where the debt came from. Kavanaugh, however, wrote that "Everyone in the group paid me for their tickets based on the cost of the tickets, to the dollar. No one overpaid or underpaid me for tickets. No loans were given in either direction." So if he was being repaid by these friends (who he still hasn't named despite being asked to), where was the debt coming from?
Probably from Kavanaugh's living beyond his means and "trying to juggle living on a judge's salary and bearing the expenses associated with climbing the ranks of Washington society, including membership in a ritzy country club," as this Yahoo analysis says. The debt was carried over for 12 years, which everyone who has high credit card balances understands—paying them off with the amount of interest they accrue is challenging, particularly when living in an expensive city like D.C. So how all of a sudden did it disappear in 2017? We don't know because Kavanaugh doesn't explain and the information he does provide "contains an unexplained three-year gap."
One of the sources of repayment he points to (though he doesn't explicitly say this is the answer) is "a significant annual salary increase for federal judges" and "a substantial back-pay award in the wake of class litigation over pay for the federal judiciary." That increase and lump sum payback were a result of a class-action case decided in 2013 and paid out starting in January 2014. Kavanaugh should have received a $26,700 per year raise starting then, as well as the lump sum back payment of probably $150,000. But his disclosures show that in the next two years, his credit card balances increased dramatically. Why would he hold onto his salary windfall for three years—accruing the highest level of debt he'd had in a decade in 2016—and then use it to pay off his credit cards? And where did he put that windfall in the meantime? That wasn't shown in his disclosures.
Yahoo examined the mortgage records for his home during those years and found that while he had refinanced in both 2014 and 2015, "neither refinancing increased the face amount of the mortgage; that appears to rule out a cash-out refinancing." He also didn't take out a line of credit against his home equity, nor did he take out a second mortgage. So the repayment money didn't come from that. He says he didn't receive financial gifts from any benefactor "other than from our family which are excluded from disclosure in judicial financial disclosure reports." So maybe his or his wife's family gave him tens of thousands of dollars last year to clear his debt? What's also only partially explained by his disclosures is where he got the $220,000 he would have needed in 2006 for a down payment on his $1.2 million home purchase. He said it came from the loan against his retirement plan, but "according to Kavanaugh's disclosure forms, that loan can only have provided up to $50,000."
Where Kavanaugh's money was going and coming from in the dozen years including 2017 is all very murky and very mysterious, coming back to some very pointed questions from Democrat Sheldon Whitehouse and the most obvious conclusion—gambling. Whitehouse asked point blank if he had "ever sought treatment for a gambling addiction" and whether he had "ever had debt discharged by a creditor for losses incurred in the State of New Jersey." Kavanaugh denied both.
Clearly, the White House didn't bother to examine any of this before Kavanaugh was nominated, or else they did and found someone who could help him out to make that little $200,000 debt problem disappear. That's not out of the question, since they cooked up the unbelievable baseball ticket story, one so unbelievable that even Kavanaugh dismisses it. They knew Republicans in the Senate don't care one way or the other, they'd confirm any person Trump put before them, even one that might be as vulnerable to blackmail or extortion as their president is.