RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/10/democrats-complain-brett-kavanaugh-fbi-investigation/

It’s unnecessary to begin with, and is not a criminal probe.

The Delay, Delay, Delay strategy to stop Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s appointment to the Supreme Court is taking the predictable course. Once they got Republicans to agree to the one-week delay, Democrats immediately started complaining that the time limit was arbitrary — that the FBI should have whatever time is necessary “to get the job done.”

Therein lies the issue, which Democrats have obfuscated from the start. “The job” is not the FBI’s job, it is the Senate’s; and the job is not to conduct a criminal investigation, it is to develop enough information that the Senate can responsibly exercise its constitutional advice-and-consent duty.

Thus understood, “the job” is already done. The Senate has more information about this nominee than it has had about any judicial nominee in history. It has vetted him before, approving his nomination to the prestigious D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. In the ensuing dozen years, Kavanaugh has issued hundreds of opinions, many of which are influential in the Supreme Court and the lower courts. He has, moreover, interacted with colleagues and litigants who give him high grades for collegiality and temperament. He has hired and mentored an impressive and diverse stable of law clerks, who think the world of him and are coveted for distinguished positions in the legal profession, including Supreme Court clerkships.

Furthermore, this nomination is the occasion for the seventh FBI background check of Kavanaugh’s career. The number is high because he has held positions of high responsibility, including national-security duties. Consequently, he has been carefully examined and found fit for access to the nation’s most closely held defense secrets.

https://pjmedia.com/video/hillary-clinton-says-kavanaugh-self-defense-is-a-denial-of-the-legitimacy-of-womens-stories/

On Tuesday at The Atlantic fest, Hillary Clinton laughed at President Trump’s second Supreme Court nominee, Judge Brett Kavanaugh. She attacked him as “unconvincing” and lacking “judicial temperament,” but praised Christine Blasey Ford — the woman who accused him of sexual assault — as “credible,” despite her story’s many holes and inconsistencies. She also praised the two women who angrily accosted Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) last Friday.

Why did she so vigorously defend the accusers and dismiss the accused? It seemed to boil down to one statement — made about then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas — that a man defending himself against sexual assault accusations “very much felt like — and in fact it probably was — the denial of the legitimacy of women’s stories” (emphasis added).

If any innocent man’s defense against allegations of sexual assault constitutes “the denial of the legitimacy of women’s stories,” then no man ever can defend himself against a false accusation.

Clinton framed her views on the issue in terms of women triumphing over a long tradition of patriarchy. She claimed the modern movement against sexual assault is “finally righting the balance, because there’s been a tremendous imbalance on women’s lives, women’s narratives. They’ve been historically dismissed, condescended to.”

The former presidential candidate argued that women in politics “find themselves picked apart, second-guessed, held to a double standard. We want to have as much right to our agency, to our autonomy, as we should be able to have, where women’s lives are valued as much as men’s lives, their stories are as important as men’s stories, they are written into history, not out of history. So that’s what I see happening.” CONTINUE AT SITE

The unquestioned conventional wisdom in Washington these days is that suburban female voters will overwhelmingly reject Republicans in November elections and that the controversy over Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh will be a contributing factor. But perhaps many of these voters would first like to know what happened to two particular suburban females in the 1980s.

It won’t be easy to find out, because most professional journalists seem to have lost interest in trying to ascertain whether Professor Christine Blasey Ford’s compelling testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee was accurate. Judging by recent coverage, much of the press corps is now endlessly fascinated by demands for a broader investigation of her allegation of attempted rape by a teenage Brett Kavanaugh but largely uninterested in the emerging evidence.

For example, most reporters don’t seem to have noticed that the woman who was the other teenage girl allegedly attending the party described by Professor Ford still isn’t backing her story. CBS News mentioned in the fifth paragraph of a story last night:

An attorney who represents Leland Keyser, who Ford said was at the house that night, told CBS News Keyser met with the FBI on Saturday. Through the attorney, Howard Walsh, Keyser has said she does not refute Ford’s account but that she has no recollection of ever being at a party or gathering where Kavanaugh was present, with or without Ford.

Today Rowan Scarborough of the Washington Times reports:

Leland Keyser, the high school friend Christine Blasey Ford counted on to corroborate her sexual assault charges, has told the FBI she has no knowledge of the supposed 1982 party or the accused, Brett Kavanaugh.

Howard J. Walsh III, her attorney, told The Washington Times that she met with the FBI on Saturday.

Asked if she had repeated the same two statements she provided the Senate Judiciary Committee, the lawyer answered, “yes.”

Sex-crimes prosecutor Rachel Mitchell reported to Republican senators on the inconsistencies in the evolving story from Professor Ford and specifically noted two statements that her lifelong friend provided to the Judiciary Committee:

Ms. Keyser stated through counsel that, “[s]imply put, Ms. Keyser does not know Mr. Kavanaugh and she has no recollection of ever being at a party or gathering where he was present, with, or without, Dr. Ford.” In a subsequent statement to the Committee through counsel, Ms. Keyser said that “the simple and unchangeable truth is that she is unable to corroborate [Dr. Ford’s allegations] because she has no recollection of the incident in question.”

Ms. Mitchell also noted another relevant part of the professor’s testimony:

Dr. Ford testified that her friend Leland, apparently the only other girl at the party, did not follow up with Dr. Ford after the party to ask why she had suddenly disappeared.

Professor Ford has reasonably made the argument that being assaulted would have made the evening much more memorable to her than to anyone else. But she’s also describing a chain of events that ought to have made an impression upon her friend. Perhaps the FBI is now exploring why a 15-year-old Leland Keyser, surprised to learn that she was the only girl at a party with older boys, would not have asked her friend at some point why she left without a word. It’s important to emphasize here that this is not a question of whether Ms. Keyser would remember such communication more than three decades later. Professor Ford testified that such communication never occurred.

One could argue that given that Ms. Keyser’s story hasn’t changed since her statements delivered by her lawyer to the committee, this is not news. But the whole premise of the new government investigation is that such statements are insufficient and that witnesses must be interviewed by FBI agents.

There is also of course an argument in this era that those alleging sexual assault should be believed, but Professor Ford will have difficulty arguing at this point that her account should not be questioned. That’s because her legal team has repeatedly demanded that she be questioned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Perhaps raising again the issue of whose interests her attorneys are really serving, the Ford team has been public in its call for further examination of the events she’s described. “NEW: FBI has not responded to requests from Christine Blasey Ford to do an interview. “We have not heard from the FBI, despite repeated efforts to speak with them,” her lawyer, Debra S. Katz, told me, when asked,” tweeted New York Times reporter Sheryl Gay Stolberg on Sunday.

Whatever the government does, there seems to be a job here for reporters as well in trying to discover more facts about what did or did not happen in a house in suburban Maryland in the 1980s. But good luck getting the press corps to focus on the alleged sexual assault when reporters are on the hunt for evidence of drunken ice-tossing.

The bet here is that suburban women, just like people in every other demographic group, want evidence to evaluate the Ford claim.

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.

https://pjmedia.com/trending/obamas-social-experiments-are-wreaking-havoc-on-america-today/

Last week, Americans watched heartbreaking testimony about sexual assault allegations against Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Democrats seem to be operating on the basis of “guilty until proven innocent,” believing the accuser without any corroborating evidence. This kind of sexual assault witch hunt actually began under former president Barack Obama — as did some of the other key social issues America is wrestling with today.

While the Left’s advocacy on social issues and identity politics long predated Obama, the former president’s policies supercharged many of the issues dividing America in 2018. His administration helped launch the current liberal cultural wave that wreaks havoc on American politics — and extends far beyond politics.

Here are five key ways Obama’s policies impacted American culture, beginning with #MeToo, sexual assault, and Brett Kavanaugh.
1. The sexual assault maelstrom.

It all started in 2011, when the Office of Civil Rights (OCR) under Obama’s Department of Education (DOE) issued a “Dear Colleague” letter reinterpreting Title IX of the 1972 Higher Education Act. The OCR letter encouraged colleges and universities to set up what Harvard law professors Jacob Gerson and Jeannie Suk called a “sex bureaucracy.”

Separate Title IX offices at colleges across the country heard sexual assault cases, doling out punishments on their own. These mini bureaucracies operated off of the false assumptions that police are biased against sexual assault victims, that 1 in 4 women on college campuses are raped, and that basic due process protections for the accused would violate the rights of the “victims.” Men who have been falsely accused — and even acquitted by real police investigations — have seen their lives and reputations destroyed.

Obama personally established the White House Task Force to Protect Students from Sexual Assault in 2014, and he teamed up with Joe Biden to launch the “It’s On Us” campaign on these issues.

Trump’s DOE, under Betsy DeVos, rightly reversed these practices. Even so, the idea that “innocent until proven guilty” does not apply in sexual assault cases has permeated popular culture, and reared its ugly head in the Kavanaugh confirmation battle. CONTINUE AT SITE

https://amgreatness.com/2018/10/01/with-the-kavanaugh

Scorched earth. That’s the tactic the Democrats and their enablers in the media and George Soros-funded hit squads are employing against Brett Kavanaugh. We all know it. We all experienced that sharp intake of breath when it was first reported that Dianne Feinstein had a letter from some anonymous female accusing Kavanaugh of having engaged in sexual misconduct with her when he was in high school. Depending on your estimate of Judge Kavanaugh’s character, you focused either on “sexual misconduct” (“Now we’ve got ’em matey!”) or on “high school” (“Really? You’re going after a guy with a sterling record because he may have hit on a girl at a party in high school?”)

I belong firmly in the latter camp. But of course that was just the beginning of an extraordinary, and orchestrated (I want to emphasize that) effort to destroy a man of exceptional ability and exceptional integrity.

Eventually, we learned the name of his accuser: Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. Almost three weeks after she went public, we still don’t know much about her. Before her accusation became public, she took great care to scrub her activities from social media and the internet. But have no fear. Even as I write, many people, outraged at her totally unsupported allegations, are piecing together a portrait of a rambunctious party girl who grew up to be an anti-Trump activist. I look forward to inspecting the portrait when it is finished.

Initially, the curious thing was how the letter—sent, Feinstein insisted, in confidence—was leaked. I believe I am correct in saying that only three sets of people had it: Ford’s lawyers (why did she engage left-wing anti-Trump lawyers just before this became public? Who is paying for them?), her local congresswoman, and Senator Feinstein’s office. I am glad that President Trump has asked the FBI to look into who leaked the letter. I’d like to know.

At first, I inclined to the idea that this obviously damaged person (I say that after having sat through her artfully incoherent, wounded-little-girl testimony) was just collateral damage in the Democrats’ effort to destroy Donald Trump’s nominee. She really did, I thought, want anonymity and was terrified at testifying before all those big meanies in the Senate.

Of course, she was treated with fawning obsequiousness. Every Democrat began his panegyric with praise of her “bravery” and “courage” in coming forward to retail her “credible” accusations.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/271483/are-we-nation-snowflakes-bruce-thornton

For ten days now, we have been obsessing over something that may have happened to a psychology professor 36 years ago when she was fifteen. According to Christine Ford, Judge Brett Kavanaugh pushed her into a room, groped her, tried to disrobe her, and put his hand over her mouth. Ford is vague on details like when and where, has named witnesses who contradict her, and lacks any other corroborating evidence. Rachel Mitchell, the prosecutor invited to cross-examine Ford and Kavanaugh last week, said she couldn’t have even obtained a search warrant to investigate this charge if it had been made at the time, let alone 36 years later.

Welcome to the snowflake nation, where unsubstantiated and unprovable charges of an attempted “rape” that allegedly took place years ago are reported with hyperbolic emotional rhetoric seldom seen for actual rape or murder. Given the confirmed, devastating brutal abuse of women taking place every minute across the globe, including in the U.S., this obsession over an unsubstantiated claim just shows how spoiled and entitled many Americans are.

Of course, the obvious reason for the hysteria on display throughout the confirmation process is amoral politics. The progressive Dems know that their most powerful weapon is a Supreme Court that dismisses the Constitution as an archaic document that must be adapted to the conditions of modernity. If Kavanaugh is confirmed, they will lose that weapon for decades, and their program of creating a technocratic oligarchy that erodes individual and state freedom will be stopped.

More specifically, the attack on Kavanaugh is about Roe v. Wade, which the new justice is allegedly itching to overturn. On-demand legal abortion has become the most important achievement both for feminists and for progressives who politicize the Supreme Court in order to reject the Constitution and its Judeo-Christian foundations. The Roe v. Wade decision attacked the notion of natural rights beyond the power of the state by inventing a new “right to privacy” unmentioned in the Bill of Rights. It also weakened the critical components of the separation of powers. It usurped Article One’s investment of legislative power in Congress, and weakened the idea of federalism that reserved for the sovereign states those law-making powers beyond the few originally reserved for Congress. The assault on Kavanaugh has focused so passionately on Roe v. Wade and abortion in order to defend the victories won by the “living Constitution.”