United States Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) has produced a new report that highlights how the Trump administration stymied efforts to investigate allegations of sexual harassment and assault levied against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in 2018, when he was a nominee for that position.
Late in the testifying stage of Kavanaugh’s nomination process, a woman named Christine Blasey Ford, a professor of psychology at Palo Alto University, publicly alleged that he had sexually assaulted her in the early 1980s. According to Blasey Ford, who testified under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee at the time, she was “100 percent positive” that Kavanaugh had tried to rape her.
Afterward, another woman, Deborah Ramirez, came forward and said that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her using his genitalia during a dorm party at Yale University in the late 1980s.
The Trump administration, in an effort to get enough senators to ignore these claims and speedily confirm Kavanaugh, said it was ordering the FBI to do a quick inquiry into the matter. Former President Donald Trump even said that he was giving the agency “free rein” to uncover any additional information about Kavanaugh relevant to the accusations.
According to Whitehouse’s report, however, that was a lie. Rather than having unabridged access to investigate the claims, the FBI was instead given no guidance on how to respond to over 4,500 tip line responses — indeed, the Trump administration never granted the agency authorization to investigate Kavanaugh. Instead, those messages were forwarded to the Trump White House, where they were not followed up on or investigated further.
The absence of additional evidence corroborating Blasey Ford’s and Ramirez’s allegations was largely what tipped the scales in favor of a narrow confirmation vote for Kavanaugh. But the lack of evidence was largely due to the fact that the FBI and the Trump administration made no effort to search for it, Whitehouse’s report shows; in one instance, senators tried to connect with the agency after their constituents provided them with information on Kavanaugh’s past, but the agency failed to follow up on the matter.
“The Congressional report published today confirms what we long suspected: the FBI supplemental investigation of then-nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh was, in fact, a sham effort directed by the Trump White House to silence brave victims and other witnesses who came forward and to hide the truth,” read a statement from the lawyers who represented Blasey Ford.
The report from Whitehouse’s office took six years to complete, the senator explained, because of obstruction from the executive branch during both the Trump and Biden administrations. It’s not uncommon for presidents to stifle such congressional inquiries, especially when it comes to how they deliberate and select nominees to the Supreme Court or other Article II-empowered actions.
The FBI’s lack of action led to the Trump administration thwarting “meaningful investigation of the allegations against Kavanaugh, denying Senators information needed to fulfill their constitutional duties,” Whitehouse said in a press release statement accompanying the report.
Whitehouse further explained why he was following up on the matter years after Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Court:
In 2018, I pledged to Christine Blasey Ford that I’d keep digging, for however long it took, and not give up or move on from the Trump White House’s shameful confirmation process for Justice Kavanaugh. A full, proper investigation is the bare minimum that victims who come forward — like Dr. Ford and Deborah Ramirez — deserve.
Whitehouse also said that revisiting the matter was important in order to ensure that situations like Kavanaugh’s do not happen again.
The FBI “must create real protocols so Senators and the American people get real answers — not manufactured misdirection — the next time serious questions about a nominee emerge late in the confirmation process,” Whitehouse said.
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