Republicans are working furiously behind the scenes (and sometimes in front of them) to make sure Thursday’s hearing on sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh goes according to plan—where the plan is to “exonerate” him at all costs. And Ford’s lawyers continue to let Republicans know that these plans are not okay.
Republicans want a “fair process,” but not an FBI investigation. They want to avoid the bad optics of Christine Blasey Ford being questioned by an all-male panel of Republicans, without doing anything extreme like having one Republican woman on the Senate Judiciary Committee. They say there’s “no reason” to call Mark Judge, the one witness to Kavanaugh’s alleged attempt to rape Ford, because apparently him having denied everything to reporters and in statements is just the same as getting him under oath and asking him serious questions.
A letter from Ford's lawyer focuses in particular on the Republican response to the bad optics question: they want to have an “experienced sex crimes prosecutor” asking the questions, rather than the senators on the Judiciary Committee. Hiring such an outside counsel, the letter says, “is contrary to the Majority’s repeated emphasis on the need for the Senate and this Committee’s members to fulfill their constitutional obligations. It is also inconsistent with your stated wish to avoid a ‘circus,’ as well as Dr. Blasey Ford’s repeated requests through counsel that senators conduct the questioning.”
The Republican insistence that there’s precedent for having such an outside counsel conduct the questioning is, the letter says, “disingenuous.” The supposed precedents, according to Republicans, are Watergate and Iran-Contra, but both were major, long-term investigations conducted by special committees and “the outside counsel hired to those Committees did not come on board to ask questions of witnesses three days before the hearings started.”
Senate Republicans are trying to set up a show trial, a cover-up for their intention to confirm Kavanaugh no matter what. Everything they’ve done suggests they believe the allegations against Kavanaugh—they just don’t care, and they don’t want the public to know about it. Ford’s lawyers absolutely must continue to call them out, and so should the rest of us.
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