I saw someone over the weekend make the point that the Democrats want to delay any vote on Brett Kavanaugh so that they can find other women willing to make allegations about him.
Here we go.
Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for porn star Stormy Daniels, is representing what he says is a group of witnesses who allege that Kavanaugh participated in “gang rapes of drunken women” at house parties while in high school.
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The whole story is laughably non-specific and non-credible. This seems to be it, in a nutshell:
“We are aware of significant evidence of multiple house parties in the Washington, D.C. area during the early 1980s during which Brett Kavanaugh, Mark Judge and others would participate in the targeting of women with alcohol/drugs in order to allow a ‘train’ of men to subsequently gang rape them,” Avenatti said in an email to Mike Davis, chief counsel for nominations for the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Avenatti offers no evidence. He merely demands that this be “investigated,” with an intensive interrogation of Judge Kavanaugh. Feel free to verify that at the NY Daily News link.
He has tweeted this, which at least sounds like the words of a rational human:
I represent a woman with credible information regarding Judge Kavanaugh and Mark Judge. We will be demanding the opportunity to present testimony to the committee and will likewise be demanding that Judge and others be subpoenaed to testify. The nomination must be withdrawn.
— Michael Avenatti (@MichaelAvenatti) September 23, 2018
But he also tweeted this:
Brett Kavanaugh must also be asked about this entry in his yearbook: "FFFFFFFourth of July." We believe that this stands for: Find them, French them, Feel them, Finger them, F*ck them, Forget them. As well as the term "Devil's Triangle." Perhaps Sen. Grassley can ask him. #Basta
— Michael Avenatti (@MichaelAvenatti) September 24, 2018
Sean Davis was…quizzical.
https://twitter.com/seanmdav/status/1044059005637853185
And then there was this.
My client is not Deborah Ramirez.
— Michael Avenatti (@MichaelAvenatti) September 23, 2018
Good to know — that narrows it down a bit — but who is Deborah Ramirez?
She’s someone else who has suddenly, possibly, sort of recalled that maybe Brett Kavanaugh did something bad when she and he were both at Yale. She wasn’t sure. But now she has come forward. Senators were informed of her potential recollections last week, and Democrats, according to the New Yorker, have been investigating them.
Deborah Ramirez, who is fifty-three, attended Yale with Kavanaugh, where she studied sociology and psychology. … She was at first hesitant to speak publicly, partly because her memories contained gaps because she had been drinking at the time of the alleged incident. In her initial conversations with The New Yorker, she was reluctant to characterize Kavanaugh’s role in the alleged incident with certainty. After six days of carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorney, Ramirez said that she felt confident enough of her recollections to say that she remembers Kavanaugh had exposed himself at a drunken dormitory party, thrust his penis in her face, and caused her to touch it without her consent as she pushed him away. Ramirez is now calling for the F.B.I. to investigate Kavanaugh’s role in the incident. “I would think an F.B.I. investigation would be warranted,” she said.
Useless, one supposes, to suggest that Ms. Ramirez approach the FBI to make a complaint, and then follow their instructions to proceed directly to the law enforcement authorities in Connecticut if she is serious about pursuing it. Why do that, when you can notify U.S. senators and call the New Yorker?
Apparently, the Ramirez “allegation” has been processed to the extent that Kavanaugh has already responded to it, stating the following:
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.
The New Yorker does cite at least three people by name, and three unnamed people, who dispute Ramirez’s story, saying they never heard about it and it would have been very much out of character for Kavanaugh. Two of the unnamed persons were men Ramirez alleged to be present at the party, and they told the New Yorker that they were not.
The New York Times had this to say:
Read this paragraph from the New York Times, then re-read it. https://t.co/6Qt4UnW4F2 pic.twitter.com/ngigW5au5u
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) September 24, 2018
Democrats have a ready-made theme going. It’s actually hilarious to see them all repeating the same talking point: that the Republicans, upon receiving word of the Ramirez allegation, responded by trying to accelerate the vote.
This Ronan Farrow & Jane Meyer story is about a very disturbing allegation of sexual misconduct by Brett Kavanaugh towards Deborah Ramirez.
You know what else is disturbing? Republicans renewed calls to accelerate the vote when they were told about this allegation last week. https://t.co/NQlDBlne5R
— Ted Lieu (@tedlieu) September 24, 2018
But the point itself isn’t even true. The Republicans in Congress didn’t call for accelerating the vote; a vote was already scheduled, and some of them merely called for not delaying it.
It’s delayed now, however, and the threat of a vote before Thursday, at the earliest, is off the table. There is close to zero chance of a vote being held this week, now that Christine Blasey Ford has reportedly agreed to testify on Thursday. Demands for other women to testify will cause further delays, if Senator Grassley tries to accommodate them all as left-wing activists and media outlets roll them out.
Delay is the purpose, clearly. As Howard Portnoy wrote on Sunday, the Democrats can achieve one significant objective by keeping Kavanaugh off the court until its current session has ended.
But they’ve already signaled that they’d be very happy to just keep the ninth Supreme Court seat vacant for another two years. I discussed last week one reason why they really, really don’t want to have a 5-4 majority of constitutionalist justices on the Supreme Court. But there’s a long agenda list of other reasons as well. Basically, any bad ruling from an appeals court has a chance of standing, over the next two years, if the Supreme Court can’t break a 4-4 standoff.
The bitter, hellish fury of the wildly unsubstantiated attack on Brett Kavanaugh is not a normal development, even from a Democratic Party that has been moving further and further leftward over the last few decades. Don’t look for substantiation of any of this either: the theme from the left has consistently been that Kavanaugh must be put in the dock and interrogated. The point of bringing forward the “accusers” is not to present evidence, but to create a pretext for smearing Kavanaugh by implication with vicious, loaded, innuendo-laden “questions.”
Don’t direct your anger at the women who will be presented to you. Some or all of them may truly have ugly, traumatic memories. There is no proof that any of their memories involve Brett Kavanaugh.
The people to be angry with are the cynical political operatives who are seeking to use these women for a desperate maneuver to defeat the just and constitutional outcome of the 2016 election: that the duly elected president gets to put justices on the Supreme Court. Whether they get what they want or not, these operatives will drop the “accusers” like a rock as soon as the women are no longer useful to them.
