RUTHFULLY YOURS

Last week California Senator Dianne Feinstein kept confidential the individual who claimed to have been sexually assaulted by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh more than 30 years ago. On Sunday, the accuser came out of the closet in classic style.

Christine Blasey Ford, a professor of psychology at Palo Alto University in California, is an activist Democrat, who in June signed a letter denouncing President Trump’s border policy. The ACLU used the letter in a lawsuit against the Trump administration. Ford told the Washington Post she had been attacked by four individuals from an unnamed “elitist boys school.” The four attackers were all now “highly respected and high-ranking members of society in Washington.”

The attack occurred at a private residence but Ford did not recall who owned the house or how she got there. On the other hand, she did recall that Brett Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge were “stumbling drunk” when Kavanaugh tried to remove her clothes and put his hand over her mouth.

“I thought he might inadvertently kill me,” Ford told the Post. “He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.” The attack left her with “anguish and terror about retaliation,” and “derailed me substantially for four or five years.” And so on, like the bogus University of Virginia rape story in Rolling Stone. For some observers the smear job on Kavanaugh may recall the 1991 hearings for Clarence Thomas.

Democrat Howard Metzenbaum, a former Communist, assailed the nominee with Anita Hill’s accusations of sexual harassment. Thomas wasn’t going to take it. “And from my standpoint as a black American” he shot back, “it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks who in any way deign to think for themselves, to do for themselves, to have different ideas.” Democrat Sen. Robert Byrd, a former Ku Klucker, didn’t like Thomas’ pushback, but the black American duly gained confirmation.

As it happens, one of the lawyers representing Anita Hill was Janet Napolitano, and in 1993 President Clinton nominated Napolitano for a U.S. Attorney job. Napolitano refused to answer questions whether she had paid one of Hill’s corroborating witnesses, Susan Hoerchner, to change her testimony. Napolitano duly became the U.S. Attorney for Arizona, the state’s attorney general, then governor of Arizona. In 2009 POTUS 44 tapped Hill’s former attorney for Homeland Security boss.

Napolitano is now president of the University of California, where she has maintained a secret slush fund of $175 million. An eleventh-hour gambit to derail a Supreme Court nominee is certainly Napolitano’s style. And there’s no denying that Feinstein, 85, is highly motivated. Fellow Democrat Kevin de León has narrowed Feinstein’s once formidable lead to only eight points.

The state senate boss has been charging that Feinstein is not tough enough on Trump, telling POLITICO “she has historically demonstrated that she is not willing to take the fight to the Republicans,” and is “very passive in her approach regarding the most important Supreme Court nominee in a generation.’’ Feinstein had the letter about Kavanaugh, the challenger charged, and “she was sitting on it for three months.”

That kind of pressure could have prompted Feinstein’s post-hearing revelation. Curiously, the senator has not fired back at the challenger, hardly short on vulnerabilities his own self.

For one thing, “The name on his birth certificate isn’t Kevin de León,” explains Christopher Cadelago of the Sacramento Bee. On his birth certificate and voter rolls, the name is Kevin Alexander Leon and “the certificate says he was born on Dec. 10, 1966, at California Hospital on South Hope Street in Los Angeles.”

According to this document, which has not been made public, the father is Andres Leon, “a 40-year-old cook whose race was Chinese and whose birthplace was Guatemala” and mother Carmen Osorio, “was also born in Guatemala.” But as a child his son Kevin Alexander Leon “spent time on both sides of the border” and “identifies strongly with Mexican culture.”  The story defies belief but does clarify some issues.

The senate boss testified that “half of my family” would be eligible for deportation under Trump’s executive order because they used false identification, drivers licenses, Social Security and green cards. And that explains why the man who styles himself Kevin de León authored California’s sanctuary law.

The story about the Chinese Guatemalan father, revealed only last year, suggests that de León wants to be the Latinobama and already has his eye on the White House. In 2014, when he became president of the state senate, he threw a huge “inauguration” bash in Los Angeles.  The high-profile Democrat is also something of a bigot with a grudge against free speech.

In 2016, Republican Senator Janet Nguyen, a refugee from Communist Vietnam, dared to speak out against New Left icon Tom Hayden. Senate boss de León spearheaded the effort to shut her up, turn off her microphone, and have Nguyen carted off the senate floor. Old hands in Sacramento had never seen a smackdown like that.

Asian voters are a strong force in California but Feinstein has not brought up the matter. And with all the resources at her disposal, the incumbent has conducted no investigation of her challenger’s unbelievable back story.  So if the man who calls himself Kevin de León replaces the San Francisco Democrat, the loss could be largely self-inflicted.

Meanwhile, Kavanaugh denies that any sexual assault ever occurred. At this writing, the vote on the confirmation vote is still slated for Thursday, September 20.