RUTHFULLY YOURS

Two years ago, Mark Judge was nearly crushed when the tumbril carrying high school pal Brett Kavanaugh to his intended execution ran him over.  I caught up with Mark this week, and I am happy to report he has recovered from his unhappy stint as Democratic roadkill.

Over the years, I have gotten to meet any number of other truth-tellers crushed by a media that Judge calls “cancerous with dishonor.”  I tell many of their stories in my new book, Unmasking Obama.  An excellent writer, Mark Judge tells his own story and does so eloquently.

Judge is the first to admit he was a troubled young man.  In 1997, as a form of atonement, he wrote an only slightly fictionalized book titled Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk.  He could never have guessed that more than twenty years later, Democrats would use the book in a clumsy — but nearly successful — plot to derail Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination.

The mechanics of the plot were obvious to anyone paying attention.  On July 6, 2018, the formal launch date, Christine Blasey Ford contacted the Washington Post tip line with this message: “Potential Supreme Court nominee with assistance from his friend assaulted me in mid 1980s in Maryland.  Have therapy records talking about it.”  On July 9, Trump nominated Kavanaugh.

On September 16, the Post’s Emma Brown broke the attempted rape story: “Ford said that one summer in the early 1980s, Kavanaugh and a friend — both stumbling drunk, Ford alleges — corralled her into a bedroom during a gathering of teenagers at a house in Montgomery County.”  The “friend” was Mark Judge.  The story shook the nation.

Once outed, Judge braced for the media assault.  “I knew that they were not going to act with honor,” he writes, and they more than lived up to his expectations.  Sometime before the Post article, Ford and her allies had apparently gotten hold of Wasted.  The book provided the detail needed to shift the alleged assault from “mid-1980s” to the “early 1980s,” a major discrepancy the Post chose not to notice, just one of many to come.

In that same article, Brown referenced the therapy records that Ford shared with the Post.  The notes speak of “four” boys in on the attack — not just Kavanaugh and Judge — all of whom went on to become “highly respected and high-ranking members of society in Washington.”

Although Judge turned his life around, no one could accuse him of becoming a “highly respected and high-ranking” member of Washington society.  Brown made no mention of that discrepancy.  Brown did question Ford about the number of attackers but took Ford at her word that the therapist had made an “error” by saying there were four.

At the time, Judge found himself caught in the middle of this media maelstrom.  In an email Brown sent to Judge before the bombshell article was published, she unwittingly revealed that Ford had told her of a girlfriend named “Leland” who was also at the party.  In her article, however, Brown made no mention of Leland Ingham Keyser.  The reason why is not hard to guess: Keyser would have already told Brown she had no memory of any such party and denied even knowing Kavanaugh.  Better to suppress that bit of buzzkill.

Judge had no memory of the event, either, and, despite media accounts to the contrary, was not shy about saying so.  “People have said that during the Kavanaugh war I avoided the press,” he writes.  “That’s not true.  I talked at length to the New York Times, telling them the truth.”  As with Keyser, the media simply did not want to hear what Judge had to say.

Brown failed to question Ford about a more obvious discrepancy.  The therapy records, reported Brown, “show Ford described a ‘rape attempt’ in her late teens.”  During her Senate testimony on September 27, Ford insisted she was 15 at the time of the attack, which she specifically placed it in 1982.  This is where Wasted comes into play.

Early in her questioning by attorney Rachel Mitchell, Ford said, “I did see Mark Judge once at the Potomac Village Safeway after the time of the attack.  And it would be helpful with anyone’s resources if — to figure out when he worked there.”

Ford was just playing dumb.  She and her allies knew when Judge worked at Safeway.  Judge says as much in his book.  “It was the summer before senior year,” he writes.  That was the summer of 1982, when Ford was 15.

Later, Democrat Sen. Dick Durbin asked Ford, “Would you please describe that encounter at the Safeway with Mark Judge and what led you to believe he was uncomfortable?”

Ford answered Durbin’s question with a suspicious amount of detail.  She told of how she went with her mother to “the Potomac Village Safeway … on the corner of Falls and River Road,” where she saw Judge “arranging the shopping carts.”  This was another item pilfered from Wasted.  Judge writes that his job was to manage the “grocery baskets” that people left in front of the store.

According to Ford, Judge “looked a little bit ill.”  Again, it was Judge himself who provided the necessary detail.  “Invariably I would be hungover — or still drunk — when I got to work at seven in the morning,” he writes in Wasted, “and I spent most of the first hour just trying to hold myself together.”

If the Senate Democrats had the book — Sen. Leahy read a quote directly from it — how could Ford and her allies not have read it?  Wasted provided them all the details they needed to specify a timeframe and set Kavanaugh up as Judge’s partner in drunken crime.

One gaping hole in Ford’s Senate testimony was her failure to recall how she got home from a distant suburban neighborhood in the era before cell phones.  “I do not remember,” she told Mitchell, “other than I did not drive home.”

In their embarrassing book, The Education of Brett Kavanaugh, New York Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly casually dismiss this memory lapse.  “[Ford] suspects that she grabbed [Keyser] who probably drove her home,” they write.  “The details of that hasty departure are no longer clear.”  They are not clear at all.  Keyser denied that the party ever occurred, let alone the drive home.

Ford knew she did not drive home because in the summer of 1982, the summer Judge worked at Safeway, she was too young.  “I did not drive home from that party or to that party, and once I did have my driver’s license, I liked to drive myself,” she added later.  As a “late teen” in the “mid-1980s” Ford would have driven herself home after being assaulted by “four boys,” all of whom were to become “highly respected” members of Washington society.  The fact that those boys obviously did not include Judge or Kavanaugh was of no consequence to the reporter who broke the story.

Judge knows why. “Brown never needed for a moment to worry about her job,” he writes.  “Nor did she express any shame.  In journalism’s current culture of dishonor, nobody ever has to.”  That culture has only grown more cancerous.  The next Supreme Court nominee can expect the worst.

Jack Cashill’s new book, Unmasking Obama, is now widely available.  To learn more, see www.Cashill.com.