Remember the Brett Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings? That’s when Lindsey Graham cried in defense of a privileged white dude’s inalienable right to a Supreme Court seat, not the time he cried in order to coax random plebs into sending Grandma’s insulin money to a self-proclaimed multibillionaire who’d just been indicted for business fraud.
We already knew the FBI’s “investigation” into sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh was a total sham. Today there’s even more evidence that the “due diligence” the government did to ensure a serial abuser wouldn’t magically fall ass-backward into a lifetime SCOTUS seat was decidedly more doo than diligent. Now we’re discovering that a separate GOP-led Senate probe was yet another beer bong full of barmy lies that Republicans forced down our throats as Kavanaugh’s nomination began to look increasingly untenable.
According to new reporting from The Guardian, a report released in 2018 by Sen. Chuck Grassley, the then-chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, included an “unfounded and unverified” claim that Deborah Ramirez, who accused Kavanaugh of exposing himself to her at a Yale dorm party, “likely” mistook the honorable boofer for another youngster with a predilection for such behavior.
RELATED STORY: Rehashing the FBI’s sham Kavanaugh 'investigation' is a net plus for Democrats
The only problem? Grassley’s patsy was a senior in high school when the incident allegedly occurred.
The suggestion that Kavanaugh was the victim of mistaken identity was sent to the judiciary committee by a Colorado-based attorney named Joseph C Smith Jr, according to a non-redacted copy of a 2018 email obtained by the Guardian. Smith was a friend and former colleague of the judiciary committee’s then lead counsel, Mike Davis.
Smith told Davis in a September 2018 email that he was in the class behind Kavanaugh and Ramirez, and that Ramirez was likely misremembering the incident.
Instead, Smith said it was a fellow classmate named Jack Maxey, who was a member of Kavanaugh’s fraternity, who allegedly had a “reputation” for exposing himself, and had once done so at a party. To back his claim, Smith also attached a photograph of Maxey exposing himself in his fraternity’s 1988 yearbook picture.
The allegation that Ramirez was likely mistaken was included in the Senate committee’s final report even though Maxey – who was described but not named – was not attending Yale at the time of the alleged incident.
Exactly how many lager-lapping future Republican luminaries were exposing themselves to classmates back in the ‘80s? Because this makes it sound like a lot. Sure, many of us drank in college—sometimes too much—but our Ron Johnsons nevertheless remained firmly ensconced in our Underoos.
It’s little surprise that Smith went to bat for Kavanaugh. According to The Guardian, he has a professional relationship with Leonard Leo, co-founder of the Federalist Society—which everyone knows is all about forcing teenagers to give birth to their rapists’ babies. (That’s a gross oversimplification, of course. The group also wants to guarantee that any dipshit can get an AR-15.)
What’s curious, though, is that Smith’s fig leaf wasn’t stripped away until now. After all, Maxey was clearly in high school at the time Kavanaugh was supposedly mistaken for him. (It might have been more believable to say Kavanaugh was mistaken for a sloppy-drunk middle schooler, but that seems unlikely, too.)
Contacted by The Guardian, Maxey confirmed that he was in high school at the time of the alleged incident involving Ramirez. “I was not at Yale,” he said. “I was a senior in high school at the time. I was not in New Haven. … These people can say what they want, and there are no consequences, ever.”
Yes, clearly that’s true! For instance, Ted Cruz was just caught on tape plotting to overturn a free and fair election, and hardly anyone is talking about it! Then again, Ted has spent his entire life trying to turn a loser into a winner, so maybe no one noticed.
The Guardian even asked Maxey if he’d visited Yale around the time of the alleged incident. He said he’d occasionally been on campus but hadn’t attended any freshman parties.
RELATED STORY: Sen. Whitehouse says allegations against Kavanaugh were ‘swept under the rug’ by FBI
Of course, because this is a story about a couple of irretrievably callow shitheels, it naturally gets weirder. Maxey, who’s currently a Republican activist (you might have guessed that based on his, erm, “reputation”), is also connected to the Hunter Biden laptop “story.” In a recent interview with The Guardian, Maxey claimed that he’d just given Biden’s hard drive—which he says Rudy Giuliani gave him—to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s government. He also used to work with Steve Bannon, until they “had a falling out.”
What?
Maxey may be a whackadoo, but it sure seems like he didn’t sexually assault Deborah Ramirez. Yet according to redacted emails reviewed by The Guardian, Smith also appears to have attempted to muddy the FBI’s investigation (like it somehow needed less transparency) by sharing with the agency just that unfounded accusation about Maxey.
Also? The Guardian story points to other new evidence of a coverup. According to “Justice,” a documentary screened at the Sundance Film Festival in January, another Yale graduate named Max Stier wanted to tell the FBI about an incident he allegedly witnessed involving Kavanaugh exposing himself at a Yale party, but “[w]hile Republicans on the Senate committee were reportedly made aware of his desire to submit information to the FBI, he was not interviewed by the committee’s Republican investigators.”
Rolling Stone:
The biggest reveal in Justice concerns Max Stier, a Yale classmate of Kavanaugh’s. According to the book The Education of Brett Kavanaugh, by New York Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, Stier, who runs the Partnership for Public Service, a prominent nonprofit (and nonpartisan) organization in Washington, D.C., informed senators and the FBI that he “saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student,” but that the FBI did not follow up with him. Justice goes one step further, airing an audio recording of Stier’s account, which the filmmakers say was entrusted to them by an anonymous source. (Stier declined to speak to the filmmakers, as did Kavanaugh.)
“This is something that I reported to my wife years ago,” Stier says, before going into detail about how he’d heard a story “firsthand” of Kavanaugh’s friends asking a heavily inebriated young woman to “hold his penis” during a dorm party. He also recalls on the audio an alleged episode he’d heard wherein a drunken Kavanaugh attempted to insert his penis into the mouth of a young woman at a dorm party while she was nearly passed out on the floor from drinking.
Damn convenient, huh?
In the end, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s report concluded that there was “no verifiable evidence” to back up Ramirez’s allegation. And that’s on top of how they treated the fearless Dr. Christine Blasey Ford.
RELATED STORY: The FBI ignored classmates who had direct testimony about sexual assault by Brett Kavanaugh
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The past week seems to have packed in a month’s worth of news. Markos and Kerry tackle it all, from Joe Biden’s big announcement to Tucker Carlson’s early retirement from Fox News.
