In the last few days some incredible things have happened in relation to the case of accused sexual preditor and Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
Republicans have claimed that Democrats had hidden information about the allgations of sexual assault from Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and only used it as a “ploy” to delay Kavanaugh’s confirmation, despite the very obvious other rationale for not sharing the information — which is the fact that Dr. Ford specifically asked to be kept anonymous and confidential — and the fact that it only leaked out when other Democrats besides Sen Feinstein were complaining about her keeping it a secret.
Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee have privately requested to view a Brett Kavanaugh-related document in possession of the panel’s top Democrat, Dianne Feinstein, but the senior California senator has so far refused, according to multiple sources familiar with the situation.
Different sources provided different accounts of the contents of the letter, and some of the sources said they themselves had heard different versions, but the one consistent theme was that it describes an incident involving Kavanaugh and a woman while they were in high school. Kept hidden, the letter is beginning to take on a life of its own.
Eshoo passed the letter to her fellow Californian, Feinstein. Word began leaking out on the Hill about it, and Feinstein was approached by Democrats on the committee, but she rebuffed them, Democratic sources said. Feinstein’s fellow senators want their own opportunity to gauge whether or not the letter should be made public, rather than leaving it to Feinstein to make that call unilaterally.
In response to this story Sen. Feinstein released the following statment on Sep. 13th.
“I have received information from an individual concerning the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court,” Feinstein said in a statement. “That individual strongly requested confidentiality, declined to come forward or press the matter further, and I have honored that decision. I have, however, referred the matter to federal investigative authorities.”
Feinstein and the Democrats did not “strategically release” the letter by Dr. Ford, once the Intercept report came out a source leaked details of the letter to CNN, then the Washington Post whom Dr. Ford had already been in contact with ultimately did a full interview with her.
It was only after Dr. Ford came forward in the WaPo on Sept 16, that Feinstein and Schumer called for a pause in the nomination. Since that occurred Republicans have been pushing to get Kavanaugh’s confirmation done and “ram it through as fast as possible” after having blocked 90% of his paper trail from view, having ignored his gambling debts and the mysterious way he paid off his baseball season tickets, having ignored his multiple lies and contradictions under oath, having refused to push for a full FBI Investigation of the allegations, having used ultimatums and bullying tactics to force Dr. Ford to testify alone without any other witnesses quickly all the while they knew there was a second accuser Deborah Ramirez who claims that Kavanaugh had placed his genitals in her face during a drunken dorm party at Yale.
However, since the reports about Ramirez claims have come out just last night, at least two more allegations against Kavanaugh have been revealed one by a client of Michael Avenatti and another by a woman who apparently placed a complaint agains Kavanaugh with the Montgomery County authorities, bringing the total number of accusers to four.
Within hours of the Ronan Farrow report the White House had a rapid response from Kavanaugh already in place.
“This alleged event from 35 years ago did not happen. The people who knew me then know that this did not happen, and have said so. This is a smear, plain and simple. I look forward to testifying on Thursday about the truth, and defending my good name—and the reputation for character and integrity I have spent a lifetime building—against these last-minute allegations.”
They also highlighted that other friends of both Kavanaugh and Ramirez from the same Yale dorm claim they never saw or heard anything about this.
- In a statement, two of those male classmates who Ramirez alleged were involved in the incident, the wife of a third male student she said was involved, and three other classmates, Dino Ewing, Louisa Garry, and Dan Murphy, disputed Ramirez’s account of events…”
- “We were the people closest to Brett Kavanaugh during his first year at Yale. He was a roommate to some of us, and we spent a great deal of time with him, including in the dorm where this incident allegedly took place.”
- “Some of us were also friends with Debbie Ramirez during and after her time at Yale. We can say with confidence that if the incident Debbie alleges ever occurred, we would have seen or heard about it—and we did not.”
These claims sound quite similar to claims made Kavanaugh’s friend Mark Judge who also claimed that does not recall attending a party like the one described by Dr. Ford and it has been on the basis of this denial and other similar denials from other named person who were supposed present that the White House has been depending on to protect Kavanaugh, unfortunately one of Judge’s ex-girlfriends has now revealed that he’s a liar.
In a story that outlined a second sexual assault accuser, Elizabeth Rasor came forward about her information on Judge and Kavanaugh.
Rasor told New Yorker reporter Ronan Farrow that she met Judge at Catholic University and that she felt morally obligated challenging his characterization of “horseplay” in high school.
[...]
Judge told her a different story about an incident involving him and other boys taking turns having sex with a drunk woman. Judge made it sound consensual and never named any other men involved. She does not know whether Kavanaugh participated.
After hearing the accusations and Judge’s response, she noted dismissal of the high school incidents were not “sexual innocence of Georgetown Prep.”
And also Rasor isn’t the only person coming out about the "sexual romps” at Georgetown Prep.
A second woman who attended high school in the 1980s in the same county as Georgetown Prep refuted Judge as well. In a letter to Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and her attorneys, the woman said she witnessed boys at parties including Georgetown Prep students that engaged in “sexual misconduct.”
The woman recalled male students who “would get a female student blind drunk” on what they called “jungle juice,” which was grain alcohol and Hawaiian Punch. They would then try to take advantage of her.
“It was disgusting,” the woman said. “They treated women like meat.”
Judge had previous criticized a Rolling Stone report claiming that a woman had been gang-raped at his fraternity.
In one piece he wrote for GotNews, Judge attacked a woman who claimed she was gang-raped for three hours. The piece has since been removed, but not before some were able to take screen capture
“There is a key part of the Rolling Stone piece that I have questions about… Jackie was a new student when she went to a fraternity party at Phi Kappa Psi. Her date, Drew, gave her spiked punch to drink and then brought he [sic] upstairs. He led her into a darkened room. Jackie ‘began to scream,’ but it was too late,” he wrote, screen captures claim.
Judge has also written books about his "party lifestyle" which went far beyond his college days.
Judge authored books God and Man at Georgetown Prep and Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk about his life as a teen alcoholic, Mother Jones reported. Kavanaugh’s accuser said that the three were at a high school party and were all drunk. It is unclear as though he left the party lifestyle, as his Facebook account seemed to be still posting photos of it as recently as 2012. MoJo noted in their headline that Judge isn’t exactly helping Kavanaugh’s case.
Speaking of wild fraternities, Kavanaugh was a member of a fairly notorious “Animal House” on the Yale campus that was known for attacting “consensually acquired” female underwear to thier flag pole and was eventually banned for 5 years after chanting “No Mean Yes, Yes Mean Anal” in front of the womens community center on campus in 2011.
In the 1985 photo, the DKE pledges — “fondly known as ‘buttholes,’” according to the caption — brandish a flag made of underwear and brasiers as they march outside Woodbridge Hall, Yale’s central administrative building. At the time, Bartlett Giamatti, the University’s president, was a former DKE brother himself.
Although the flag may seem shocking by today’s standards, the photograph appeared in 1985 under the tongue-in-cheek headline “DKE AT PLAY.” At the time of the escapades, Kavanaugh — who does not appear in the photo — was a sophomore, already inducted into the fraternity.
But in a comment on a post in the YaleWomen Facebook page, Jennifer Lew ’87, a classmate of Kavanaugh’s, recalled that DKE brothers would ransack women’s rooms while they were in class to collect undergarments. Another alumnus, Julie Klein ’87, described DKE as an “animal house.”
In addition to DKE, Kavanaugh also belonged to Truth and Courage, one of Yale’s secret societies for seniors. Among some students, the all-male club, which was popular with athletes, was known by the nickname “Tit and Clit.”
Truth and Courage fizzled out of existence in the early 2010s. But since Kavanaugh’s graduation in 1987, DKE’s reputation for mistreating women at Yale has only grown. Yale banned DKE from campus for five years in 2011 after videos circulated of fraternity recruits chanting “no means yes, yes means anal” in front of the University’s Women’s Center.
On top of all that a high school classmate of Dr. Ford, Cristina King Miranda who also signed letter of support for Ford claims to remember an “incident” involving Kavanaugh and Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and that it was "talked about for days afterward at the school” now says that she may not come forward because she has been overwhelmed by media requests.
Miranda eventually deleted her facebook post and told NPR that she didn’t didn’t know "That it happened or not, I have no idea," Talking to NPR's Nina Totenberg Miranda "I can't say that it did or didn't."
In my [Facebook] post, I was empowered and I was sure it probably did [happen]," Miranda told NPR. "I had no idea that I would now have to go to the specifics and defend it before 50 cable channels and have my face spread all over MSNBC news and Twitter."
It actually doesn’t matter if she can confirm all of Dr. Ford’s story — what she has already confirmed is that there was some kind party, and some kind of incident was known or at least rumored to occured during that party involving Dr. Ford. That alone makes Kavanaugh and Judge liars since they’ve said they were never at any such party.
What’s worse than all this is the fact that Michael Avenatti now says he has multiple new clients who confirm what Rasor has said about Judge and also the third woman’s claims that women were anestitized with “jungle juice" then “treated like meat” as the boys of Georgetown Prep gang-raped them in a “train.”
Avenatti is aware of “significant evidence of multiple house parties” in DC in the 80s where Kavanaugh, his friend Mark Judge and others would “target women with alcohol/drugs to allow a train of men to subsequently gang rape them.”
Avennati claims there are multiple witnesses who will corroborate this.
He says Kavanaugh must be questioned about:
*whether he targeted women for rape
*whether he ever attended a party where a woman was gang raped or used by multiple men
*whether he ever saw a line of men outside a room at a party where he understand a woman was being raped inside
*Whether he ever participated in sexual conduct where a woman was intoxicated or drugged
*whether he ever talked to Mark Judge or others about participating in a “train” of men having sex with a woman
*whether he ever tried to stop anyone from having sex with women who were intoxicated or drugged.
Also Politico has been reportly talking to Avenatti saying he has multiple witnesses and one additional victim.
“I represent multiple clients, they are witnesses. I’m representing multiple individuals that have knowledge of this, there’s no other attorneys involved,” Avenatti told POLITICO. Asked if the witnesses attended Georgetown Prep’s sister school, he said they went beyond that. “They went to schools in the same general areas. These house parties were widely attended.”
Avenatti said his new claims are "not out of character from what Dr. Ford said.”
Lastly — at least so far today — there is apparently a fourth victim who has filed a report against Kavanaugh with the Montgomery County authorities.
Investigators in Montgomery County confirmed Monday they’re aware of a potential second sexual assault complaint in the county against former Georgetown Prep student and Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
While investigators weren’t specific and spoke on background, they said they are looking at allegations against Kavanaugh during his senior year in high school after an anonymous witness came forward this weekend.
This would potentially bring the number to four women accusing Kavanaugh of wrongdoing and comes after Deborah Ramirez, a former Yale college student, stepped forward this weekend to accuse Kavanaugh of exposing himself to her in college, and after attorney Michael Avenatti tweeted out a message saying he represents a woman with “credible information regarding Judge Kavanaugh and Mark Judge.”
So that’s literally since yesterday an escalation of one victim to four victims with at least one coorberating witness that we know of, Elizabeth Rasor who happens to damage the credibility of Kavanaugh;s primary defense witness Mark Judge — who refuses to testify — and apparently multiple other witnesses now represented by Avenatti.
Obviously the FBI should have been investigating this case for some time in order to untangle all of these conflicting threads, just as Democrats have fairly consistently been saying, but so far the White House has refused to grant them the authority required to extend Kavanaugh background check to include these issues.
Instead the GOP from the White House, Congress to various GOP Operatives have put on a full court press to embarras and harrass Dr. Ford and desperately insulate Kavanaugh even as additional accusers and claims begin to pile up.
Iniialtly Trump kept his cool while WH aides scrambled to keep him from attacking Christine Ford: “Hopefully he can keep it together until Monday” But they failed. Trump since last week has claimed the “real” victim is Kavanaugh in reaction to Dr. Ford’s allegations and that the FBI “knows Kavanaugh very well" after doing six previous background checks on him. He’s tweeted that “Kavanaugh is under assault by the radical left” and claimed that Dr. Ford would have gone to police if assault was ‘as bad as she says’ even though sexual assault is one of the least reported crimes in the nation, which is exactly how the Houston Police Chief put it in rebuttal of Trump. He’s also said that the allegations against Kavanaugh are "totally political," and that "I am with him all the way," adding "There's a chance this could be one of the single most unfair, unjust things to happen to a candidate for anything. But I am with Judge Kavanaugh and I look forward to a vote."
The obvious counter to that is of course: Merrick Garland.
While Trump has been attacking the victim his White House has been busy preping Kavanaugh for the upcoming hearing, which isn’t going well since he refuses to answer personal questions about his dating and sex-life even with WH staff, and also they’ve been concocting additional counter narratives such as the conspiracy theory that Ford is “merely mistaken” about who was her attacker
90 minutes after the WH was informed by the WaPo about Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s identity deputy press secretary Raj Shah informed various GOP operatives including Kavanaugh’s friend Ed Whalen who decided he was going to blame a completely different man for the attack..
...The Post now reports, Raj Shah, the Deputy Press Secretary who would be responsible for coordinating an official response reportedly “called a number of Trump allies to warn them about the upcoming story.”
The Post‘s source for the allegations against Shah were provided on the condition of anonymity.
[Raj Shah] disclosed Ford’s identity to a number of people,” the Post reports.
However, the source and the Post sought to distance Shah from the conduct of Kavanaugh ally Ed Whalen. Whalen, a close friend of Kavanaugh, searched Blasey Ford’s LinkedIn page before the Post’s story was published as part of his research.
Whelen’s research into Blasey Ford culminated in a series of conspiracy theory tweets in which he named another man who was party of Kavanaugh’s social circle that he alleged was the real rapist.
Dr. Ford almost immediately reponded to Whelen’s accusation saying she knew both Kavanaugh and the other boy and there was ‘Zero chance I would confuse them’.
In reaction to the news that Dr. Ford had passed a polygraph test when questioned about her accusations Fox News has argued that she may have passed the test because she’s a psychopath or sociopath.
Results of a polygraph provided to The Washington Post indicated that Ford was telling the truth when she said Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed and groped her.
An article published on the FoxNews.com website on Wednesday attempted to undermine Ford and the polygraph test. According to the report, Fox News hosts Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham both feature segments refuting Ford’s polygraph results.
“Without mentioning any particular instances, one former senior FBI agent said polygraphs would have difficulty detecting deception by sociopaths, psychopaths and committed liars lacking a ‘conscience,'” Fox News argued in the article.
So that’s pretty disgusting, but then you have a pack of GOP operatives who pretended to be “regular Trump Voters” on CNN and proclaiming in response to the attack on Ford that twas “there was no intercourse, there was maybe a touch… and she can’t seem to get over that?” and seriously asked “What teen hasn't done this?” and that they have no sympathy for what she went through. “We all make mistakes at 17.”
What horny highschool boy hasn’t commited sexual assault? I think most of them.
GOP Senate candidate Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-ND) has said the Kavanaugh assault accusations are ‘absurd’ because he didn’t succeed in assaulting ‘drunk’ Dr. Ford even though a failed rape is still an attempted rape and criminal sexual assault, also she said *he* was drunk, not her.
Sen. Linday Graham has had similar sentiments claiming “I’m not going to ruin Kavanaugh’s life over this”, even though Kavanaugh may have very much ruined my of Dr. Ford’s life with permanent trauma, and he’s accused Democrats of “Witness Coaching” while Kavanaugh has spent four days straight being prepped by WH staff.
Meghan Kelly is literally screaming at people “He’s claims he didn't do it.”
The Washington Times has claimed that Dr. Ford led a “wild childhood on the Dewey Beach party scene because of an anonymous restaurant owner says that two boys once got into a public fist fight over her in the early 80’s. Yeah, that explain sexual assault just perfectly.
South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman decided to tell a “joke” during a debate with his Democratic rival: "Did you hear about this?" he said at the opening of the debate, according to The Post and Courier. "Ruth Bader Ginsburg came out saying she was groped by Abraham Lincoln." [Ain't that a knee slapper?]
Don Jr. retweeted a Dinesh D’souza article that tries to slut shame Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser Dr. Ford. “No one in the media is covering the culture of hookups and binge drinking the accuser was part of,” [Actually that’s true, but it was the culture at Kavanaugh’s prep school, not Dr. Ford’s.]
Chuck Grassley has stated who will be questioned and who will ask the questions is “non-negotiable”, he’s lashed out at Democrats for dredging up decades old allegations and vowed tha Kavanaugh will be confirmed.
And the Alt-Reich media has gone absolutely ballistic over all this.
Trump supporters are mad.
They have been screaming at the GOP to FIGHT against the demonic Democrats this entire time, during the Kavanaugh hearing. But did they listen? No.
Instead of holding the vote when they should have, ignoring the goofy #MeToo stunt, they caved, and virtue signaled to the left, trying to show them how moral and fair they were.
And while they did that – the dirty Democrats set them up – used the time to prep and trot out accuser #2, and now the GOP is left standing there, weak, and defeated….and Trump supporters are screaming even LOUDER, “FIGHT.”
So of course, Kavanaugh has given a self-serving sotftball interview on — what else — Fox News by one of Roger Ailes largest defenders.
“The fact that Kavanaugh would make an unprecedented media appearance to try to save his nomination to the Supreme Court says a lot about how frantically he’s spinning this story,” said Executive Vice President Marge Baker in a statement. “The fact that he’s chosen to make an appearance on Fox News says even more.”
She noted it’s ironic to hear Fox News host Martha MacCallum is doing the interview given her defense of Roger Ailes.
“Fox News is essentially the house organ of the Republican Party. The interviewer, Martha MacCallum was one of Roger Ailes’s most vocal defenders before he was forced to resign because of a pattern of sexual assault and harassment. This isn’t journalism,” the statement continued. “It’s propaganda. Anyone who watches it should keep that in mind.
“Most importantly, Brett Kavanaugh has already made clear that he’s not interested in having the facts be known. If that were the case, in his letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee today he would not have called the statements by brave women ‘smears’ and ‘character assassination,'” she cited the SCOTUS nominee.
They've exploited a false story about Rod Rosenstein running to the White House to be fired in order to distract from Kavanaugh’s case collapsing with the allegations of Ramirez.
The GOP has clearly pulled out every stop to attack Kavanaugh’s accusers, from suggesting that Dr. Ford is a psychotic — “a litle bit nutty and a little bit slutty” — too dumb to know which boy was on top of her cutting of her oxygen while ripping off her clothes or else she is merely a “coached” Democrat shill.
All of this combines to build a virulently anti-women agenda among the GOP from the top to the bottom and it could be potentially devastating to their party.
The images are striking: The specter of Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee — all 11 of them men — questioning U.S. Appeals Court Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh’s female accuser. A senior GOP aide working on the confirmation resigning amid his own sexual harassment allegations. A viral photo of “women for Kavanaugh” featuring more men than women. A South Carolina Republican congressman making a crude joke about Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg being groped by Abraham Lincoln.
[...]
The moment brings into sharp relief the gulf that has emerged between the two political parties as they navigate America’s cultural reckoning on sexual assault. Democrats have embraced the #MeToo movement to galvanize female voters and attempt to lift scores of female candidates to victory in November’s midterm elections. A growing number of Democratic women are also considering presidential campaigns in 2020.
By contrast, strategists in both parties say Trump’s agenda and style — and the fact that the GOP leadership stands mostly in lockstep with him — are undoing years of often painstaking work by party leaders to court more female and minority voters.
Trump risks solidifying the Republican Party as the party of men. Though he is not on the ballot this fall, he is framing the midterm elections as a referendum on his presidency, and that has leaders and operatives in the party fearing what GOP strategist Alex Castellanos termed a “pink wave” of women powering a Democratic takeover of the House and perhaps the Senate to deliver a rebuke to Trump.
“The antipathy to Trump from women — college-educated, white, suburban women — transcends anything I’ve ever seen in politics,” Castellanos said. “And it’s not just against Trump’s policies, of course. It’s against Trump as the 1960s ‘Mad Men’ alpha male. It’s Trump who grabbed women where he shouldn’t. Women are coming out to vote against Donald Trump because they see him as a cultural
Former GOP Governor Christine Todd Whitmann has echoed these sentiments on MSNBC.
“I think where we’ll see the difference is in November. You have more women running for office at all levels. ” Governor Whitman said. “And that’s what will change things. You have to get in there.
Whitman openly mocked her party, which has fallen under scrutiny for their treatment of Kavanaugh accuser Christine Ford, who says the nominee tried to rape her when she was 15.
“I laugh when I hear the Republicans saying we’re going to bring in a female lawyer,” Whitman said, predicting that Judiciary Republicans -who are entirely elderly, white, and male- will only bring their party more trouble with the Kavanaugh hearings. “You want to say, ‘why didn’t you put more women on committee? Why don’t you encourage more women to run’?”
Also the Violence Against Women Act is about the expire in just a few days and the GOP doesn’t seem inclined to lift a finger to do anything about it.
The Violence Against Women Act — which directs the national response to crimes of domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence and stalking — will expire at the end of September if lawmakers don’t act fast.
In late July, House Democrats introduced a measure to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, or VAWA. Then House lawmakers went on recess. When they return on Sept. 4, they will have only a few weeks before the law expires.
Clearly the GOP is far more interested in protecting Kavanaugh than protecting women from men like Kavanaugh, I think America’s woman are going to notice this November.