RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://thefederalist.com/2018/10/02/61-questions-the-fbi-should-ask-about-christine-blasey-fords-story/

I am a former prosecutor, a father of three daughters, a brother to five sisters. I’ve drawn up a list of questions relevant to the FBI investigation of Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault allegation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

Several, including the first ones, are for the FBI to answer. The rest are for the FBI to ask of Ford and others, including her parents and her siblings. The FBI may not read this, of course, but it may help you assess the FBI’s work and Ford’s credibility. It can be difficult for any of us to remember an incident. And our memories can play tricks. As an examiner, all we can do is try to help the alleged witness remember what happened, with all five senses and the accompanying emotions.

I number these for reference. I have sought to avoid including any questions that appeared to have been answered already.

I won’t address why I’ve included each question, but let me describe the two groupings of questions.

First, there are a few questions on Ford’s knowledge of national current affairs and of Washington, D.C., affairs, and on her knowledge of Kavanaugh’s career. It may be that because she lives on the West Coast and works in a field unrelated to history, current events, journalism, law, and government, Ford may have been totally oblivious to Kavanaugh’s career. Until we know the answers to those questions, we don’t know. But a good prosecutor could line up one detail after another, and raise suspicions about why, after all of the national notoriety Kavanaugh received, especially after his nomination to the D.C. Circuit (that lasted three years), she raised no allegation against him before his nomination to the Supreme Court.

Second, there are questions about who knew Ford was leaving the gathering on the first floor to go upstairs. It is not likely that two boys lay in wait on the second floor for her. So they must have gone up the stairs behind her, so close behind her that she didn’t have enough time to get to the bathroom. Not just one boy, but two. And neither of them lived in that house. And she didn’t notice, or hear, that? And no one else noticed this oddity either?

https://www.nationalreview.com/news/dianne-feinstein-friday-too-soon-to-vote-brett-kavanaugh/

Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said on Tuesday that lawmakers should not be made to vote on Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court this week.

Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said on Monday that the Senate would vote on Kavanaugh’s confirmation on Friday, at the conclusion of the one-week FBI investigation into the allegations of sexual assault that have been levied against the nominee by three women.

“The time for endless delay and destruction has come to a close,” McConnell said. “Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination is out of committee, we’re considering it here on the floor, and Mr. President, we’ll be voting this week.”

Feinstein, who led her Democratic colleagues in calling for the confirmation vote to be delayed pending an FBI probe, said on Tuesday that the report detailing the findings of the investigation should not be made public.“It would seem to me that if people are going to be identified, this ought to be held very close,” she said.

McConnell confirmed on Tuesday afternoon that the report will only be seen by senators and will not be made publicly available.

The White House ordered the FBI to investigate the sexual-assault allegations against Kavanaugh on Friday at the behest of Republican leadership. The FBI was initially instructed to interview just four witnesses, but the White House expanded the probe on Monday, instructing the FBI to interview any witnesses with pertinent information.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/fallout-from-the-kavanaugh-hearings-a-permanent-cloud/

After the trial by fire, he could prove to be one of the most fearless, principled justices on the Court.

Conventional wisdom suggests that, if confirmed, Supreme Court Justice Kavanaugh forever will be “smeared” and stained by past frenzied unfounded allegations of sexual assault.

Yet the opposite just as well may be true. As a Supreme Court justice, Kavanaugh would have withstood every imaginable smear and slander and yet stayed defiant in defending his character and past, proof of both his determination and principles. His near-solitary rebuttal to his Senate accusers may suggest that Kavanaugh could prove to be among the most fearless justices on the Court.

Indeed, the only lasting effect, if any, of the serial smears lodged against him might be that in the future, as in the case of Justice Thomas, Kavanaugh would be essentially immune from progressive media attacks. What he went through likely has inoculated him from the Georgetown-party-circuit syndrome of conservative Supreme Court judges’ eventually becoming more liberal by the insidious socialization within the larger D.C. progressive media, political, and cultural landscape.

Incidentally, contrary to popular opinion, Clarence Thomas hardly remains under a permanent cloud after his ordeal. What stopped further Robert Borking for a while was the resistance and pushback of Clarence Thomas. Far from being ruined by unproven charges, he resisted the mob, got confirmed, and thereby established a precedent that innuendo, ipso facto, would not derail a nominee. For three decades, Thomas has not been regarded as suspect by most Americans but is seen as inspirational for his courage in facing down character assassination.

We have a strange standard of calibrating relative Supreme Court comportment. Thomas certainly has never said from the bench anything remotely like Justice Ginsburg’s “Frankly, I had thought that at the time Roe was decided, there was concern about population growth and particularly growth in populations that we don’t want to have too many of.”

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/brett-kavanaugh-perjury-allegations-farce

Taking advantage of the pause forced by Jeff Flake’s change of heart last week, opponents of Brett Kavanaugh have shifted their focus from the original charge of sexual assault to the allegation that he repeatedly perjured himself before the Senate Judiciary Committee. It’s certainly true that Kavanaugh tried to minimize the least admirable aspects of his adolescence — understandably, given the withering fire he was under and the basic irrelevance of the matters under discussion — but there is no evidence he lied.

Much of the focus is on his drinking. There are two main lines of argument here. The first: Kavanaugh has misleadingly portrayed himself as a “squeaky clean” “choir boy,” but there is plenty of evidence that he was a heavy drinker. This begins from a false premise. Kavanaugh has said he was pious and hardworking in high school and college, but he also said in his Senate testimony that he drank excessively on occasion: “I drank beer with my friends. Almost everyone did. Sometimes I had too many beers. Sometimes others did.” Drinking in high school and college is obviously compatible with attending church or participating in community service.

The more relevant question is not whether Kavanaugh drank to excess, but whether he drank to the point of blacking out. Democrats want to establish that if he blacked out once, he may have blacked out at the alleged party with Ford and assaulted her while having no memory of it. This itself is a stretch and obviously a way to try to make up for the fact that there is no corroborating evidence of the assault.