Democrats Endorse Avenatti Brett Kavanaugh’s opponents will believe anything.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/democrats-endorse-avenatti-1538004075
Now comes a third accuser against Brett Kavanaugh, this time claiming the Supreme Court nominee was part of a gang of high school boys who spiked the drinks of teenage girls in order to assault and rape them. Really? Does even Mazie Hirono believe this?
The charge comes from Julie Swetnick, a Washington-area woman elevated to accusatory fame on Wednesday by Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for porn actress Stormy Daniels. She claims that Mr. Kavanaugh and high school friend Mark Judge drank to excess at numerous parties and then assaulted girls and women with abandon. She says in a sworn statement that the gang would “‘target’ particular girls” who were alone or shy for serial rape.
So we are supposed to believe that the boys at Georgetown Prep, amid their dreams of Yale, conspired to commit drug and sex crimes on multiple occasions over many years. Yet word of this rape gang at an elite Jesuit high school never made it to anyone in authority. None of the rape victims spoke up—not to a teacher, parent or other official—then or since. None of the boys bragged about it to friends who spoke to a parent or priest.
As for Ms. Swetnick, she says in her statement that she was personally assaulted in 1982 at one of these parties, yet she admits that she attended “well over 10” of these parties from 1981-1983. This means she would have returned to these parties even after she was gang-raped. She suddenly recalls it all now after 35 years, though somehow this never came up during FBI investigations of Mr. Kavanaugh’s background over more than two decades.
Messrs. Judge and Kavanaugh deny the accusation, with Mr. Kavanaugh calling it “ridiculous and from the Twilight Zone.” But that’s unfair to the late Rod Serling, who was more subtle than this kind of character assassination. We wouldn’t even report the details of this latest smear if Democrats and the left weren’t treating the accusation as disqualifying for the Supreme Court.
Within hours of the Avenatti-Swetnick claim, every Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee called for Mr. Kavanaugh to withdraw as a nominee. This would be politically convenient because it would let them suggest that Mr. Kavanaugh must have been guilty. It would also spare their fellow Democrats running for re-election this year from having to vote on the nomination.
But if this is the new confirmation standard, then we have entered a politics in which anyone can be destroyed by anyone making an incendiary charge, even without supporting evidence. All an opposition Senator has to say is that the accusation seems “credible,” and a nominee can be disqualified. The new political standard will be the presumption of guilt.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer says this traditional due process standard doesn’t apply to Mr. Kavanaugh because a nomination isn’t a criminal trial. But due process for the accused is rightly employed as the standard across nearly all of American public and private life. The burden of proof is on the accuser.
This holds for charges of scientific fraud, legal malpractice, or violating the standards of a professional society. It even holds, tenuously, for sexual-assault cases on most college campuses where at least an accuser has to meet a 50.1% “preponderance of evidence” standard. If “J’Accuse” is the new standard of proof, then we have a long list of Democrats who should be summarily dismissed from public life. This is one reason we wrote that former Democratic Senator Al Franken should have defended himself after he claimed he was unfairly charged with mistreating women.
Keep all this in mind as you watch the Senate hearing Thursday with Mr. Kavanaugh’s first accuser, Christine Blasey Ford. She’s been treated respectfully by Republicans even after ranking Democrat Dianne Feinstein withheld her accusation from fellow Senators for six weeks this summer while it could have been vetted. Instead it was dropped, like the other two accusations, at the last minute.
If new facts show that Mr. Kavanaugh committed the acts that Ms. Swetnick alleges, he can be impeached. But accusations alone, without corroboration or evidence, do not amount to proof by any standard of fair due process— no matter how many times Democrats assert it.
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