A new book on the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court reveals the depth of coordination his opponents engaged in to stop the nominee.
In “Justice on Trial” The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway and the Judicial Crisis Network’s Carrie Severino write that liberal groups coordinated and paid for the supposedly spontaneous protests in the first round of hearings and that Democratic senators staged Christine Blasey Ford’s hearing to create parallels with Anita Hill.
Here are two passages from the book, which is out on Tuesday:
Kavanaugh came into the first day of hearings determined to remain positive, but by the end of the day the hearings had turned hostile. Raj Shah counted sixty-three interruptions from Senate Democrats, mostly related to demands for more of Kavanaugh’s irrelevant paperwork and other trivial delaying tactics that had nothing to do with evaluating his substantive qualifications. More than seventy protesters were arrested. Those protesters didn’t arrive spontaneously. Planned Parenthood Action Fund flew in ‘storytellers’ from as far away as Alaska and North Dakota. Winnie Wong, a senior advisor to the Women’s March, explained their carefully coordinated messages. Members going into the hearing room were given ‘a script where we suggest certain messaging that may resonate more.’ The storytellers’ travel and accommodations were paid for, as were their legal aid and bail if they were arrested, which was generally the goal. Later in the hearings, the organizers of the protesters—the Women’s March and the Center for Popular Democracy— were warning activists that being arrested three times might lead to a night in jail. The group raised sums of more than six figures to finance the protests. ‘This is well-organized and scripted,’ said Wong, ‘This isn’t chaos.’ …
At this point, [Christine Blasey] Ford reiterated a request for caffeine she had made before she began reading her testimony. Bromwich, seated next to her, added, ‘a Coke or something.’ As they walked out of the hearing room during a later break in Ford’s testimony, multiple staffers heard Senator Hirono tell Senator Harris that it was a great idea to have Ford wear a blue suit and ask for a Coke as a throwback to the Thomas-Hill hearings. One of the unsubstantiated claims Hill had made against Thomas involved a Coke can. Senator Hirono had also mentioned Hill repeatedly in her media appearances as soon as the initial Post report was published.
