Over the weekend, The Washington Post published details of Christine Blasey Ford’s accusations of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Ford apparently initially detailed her accusations in a letter she sent to Rep. Anna G. Eshoo, a Democratic congresswoman who passed it along to Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
In the letter, Ford says Kavanaugh pinned her down at a party while they were both in high school and covered her mouth when she tried to scream. She says his friend, Mark Judge, jumped on the bed and was able to break them up, at which point Ford says she wriggled out from under Kavanaugh and fled.
Feinstein sat on the accusation for roughly two months and refused to share it with her colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Throughout days of questioning during his confirmation hearings, Kavanaugh was never once asked about these allegations. Apparently the Democratic senator did not want them to go to light until now. The question is, why?
Were the Allegations Not Credible?
Ford says she never recounted the incident until a couples therapy session with her husband, Russell Ford, in 2012 — 30 years after the fact. Here’s what her husband had to say about that:
In an interview, her husband, Russell Ford, said that in the 2012 sessions, she recounted being trapped in a room with two drunken boys, one of whom pinned her to a bed, molested her and prevented her from screaming. He said he recalled that his wife used Kavanaugh’s last name and voiced concern that Kavanaugh — then a federal judge — might one day be nominated to the Supreme Court.
The fact that she supposedly said she was worried Kavanaugh would be nominated to the Supreme Court the first time she ever spoke about the incident three decades after “one summer in the early 1980s” is odd enough to make any reasonable person skeptical.
The only corroborating proof Ford offers are therapist’s notes from the session, which Ford provided to the Post. In these notes, four boys are listed as the attackers, not two, as she told the Post. The discrepancy in the number of attackers is, she says, an error her therapist made. Kavanaugh’s name is never mentioned throughout the notes, and the only descriptive details she gives of her attackers are that they were “from an elitist boys’ school” who went on to become “highly respected and high-ranking members of society in Washington.”
The Post does not tell us if physical descriptors of these boys made it into the therapy notes either. We only know that Ford made a point to describe them as “elitist” which, again, is an odd choice of words.
If Feinstein was unsure about Ford’s credibility, it would be reasonable for her to withhold the letter from the public. So why are we hearing about this now, in the eleventh hour of the confirmation process?
Do Democrats Have No Other Ammo Against Kavanaugh?
For the past two weeks, the nation has watched as leftist protestors loudly disrupted Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, dressed as condoms and handmaids and funeral attendees.
We watched as Democratic senators tried to delay and disrupt the hearings and throw toddler-like tantrums when they didn’t get their way. We watched as Sen. Cory Booker pretended to fall on his nonexistent sword to release e-mails in an effort to smear the federal judge as a racial profiler, but it completely backfired. We watched as Sen. Kamala Harris followed a nonsensical line of questioning then deceptively edited the exchange to make it look like Kavanaugh thinks contraceptives are “abortion-inducing drugs,” when in reality he was characterizing a Catholic group’s position on the matter. We watched as members of the media repeated this lie and ignored that he has a record of saying the opposite.
After two weeks of watching Democrats throw everything in the kitchen sink at Kavanaugh and miss, it’s reasonable to ask: are we now just hearing about this because Democrats have nothing else? Are they using this woman’s (inconsistent and so far uncorroborated) story only because it is politically expedient? All signs point to yes.
When she was forced to take action on the matter, Feinstein released a cagey statement saying she referred the matter to the FBI — which would probably not have any jurisdiction to handle the matter, as the bureau investigates federal crimes. Why didn’t Feinstein alert local law enforcement in Maryland, which has no statute of limitations on sex crimes involving minors? Could it be because she doesn’t want these allegations to be taken seriously or to be handled by the proper legal channels? If so, why?
In a statement released Monday afternoon, Judiciary Chairman, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), said Feinstein has refused to cooperate with efforts to setup a phone call with Ford to discuss the allegations further.
“I asked Senator Feinstein’s office yesterday to join me in scheduling these follow-up (phone calls),” Grassley said. “Thus far, they have refused. But as a necessary step in evaluating these claims, I’ll continue working to set them up.”
Why would Feinstein refuse to help her committee colleagues dig deeper to investigate these claims? One would think that she would be invested in ensuring that this woman gets to tell her story and be heard, but it’s clear Feinstein is not interested in bringing the truth to light. The Democrat’s interest in Ford’s claims only go as far as they are useful to serve as a derailment to Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
It’s clear Feinstein and other Senate Democrats’ only interest in this letter is political expediency. Why else would Feinstein have sat on this letter until now? Right now Democrats are setting a dangerous precedent — that instead of going to the proper legal channels and battling out accusations of sexual assault in court, the information will be held onto and silenced until it furthers a specific agenda.