Tag: Brett Kavanaugh

New reporting details how FBI limited investigation of Kavanaugh allegations

WASHINGTON — As Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh prepares for his second year on the Supreme Court, new reporting has detailed how the limits ordered by the White House and Senate Republicans last year constrained the FBI investigation into allegations of sexual misconduct when he was a college freshman.

The FBI was informed of allegations that Kavanaugh, while drunk during his freshman year at Yale, exposed himself to two heavily intoxicated female classmates on separate occasions. The bureau did not interview more than a dozen people who said they could provide information about the incidents.

One of the accounts, reported by Deborah Ramirez, was made public at the time of Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. The other, not publicly known until this weekend, was reported by a male classmate who said he witnessed the incident. He unsuccessfully sought to get the FBI to investigate with help from a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee who asked FBI Director Christopher A. Wray to look into the allegation.

View the complete September 16 article by Jackie Calmes on The Los Angeles Times website here.

‘The Education of Brett Kavanaugh’ Takes a Hard Look at the Supreme Court Justice and His Accusers

New York Times logoTHE EDUCATION OF BRETT KAVANAUGH
An Investigation
By Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly

Nearly a year after the fateful Supreme Court confirmation hearings, Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh have become martyrs in separate and hostile galaxies — one for #believeallwomen and the other for those who believe Democrats will use any means necessary to take down good and honorable men. So there is a weird satisfaction in rewinding the story more than 30 years, back to the moment when the two lived in suburban Maryland and coexisted as part of a small social circle of teenagers who hung out at country club pools all summer and whose pressing concern was which parents were out of town for the weekend.

“The Education of Brett Kavanaugh,” by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, two experienced New York Times reporters who helped cover the confirmation hearings, comes with an expectation of bombshells (the galleys are stamped “EMBARGOED” on every page). And the authors do in fact turn up a few new revelations about the assault accusations against Kavanaugh. But their real work is to smooth out the main story, create a fuller picture of Kavanaugh himself, place him in relation to Blasey Ford and put the minor players in motion, so that the confirmation showdown has a kind of cinematic inevitability. Continue reading “‘The Education of Brett Kavanaugh’ Takes a Hard Look at the Supreme Court Justice and His Accusers”

Legal scholar tracks down the bizarre origins of the right-wing phrase Justice Kavanaugh used in a new opinion

Justice Brett Kavanaugh was appointed the Supreme Court by President Donald Trump for one clear purpose: to fortify the majority of conservative justices than can protect the right-wing agenda through the judicial branch.

And while there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that Kavanaugh will be a dutiful player in this role, there always remains a possibility that a justice will go rogue once appointed and fail to follow the wishes of the party behind his or her nomination. But in a new majority opinion announced on Monday, joined by the other four Republican appointees on the court, Kavanaugh sent a clear signal that he’s a party man to his core.

The decision came in the case of Manhattan Community Access Corp. v. Halleck, where the court was faced with the question of whether a public access television channel is a state actor and thus bound by the First Amendment. The five conservative justices said the non-profit organization functions as a private actor in its role and is therefore not hampered by the Constitution, while the four liberal justices disagreed.

Mysterious dark money group got $22 million to get Trump SCOTUS pick Kavanaugh confirmed

A just-published report by the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics’ award-winning OpenSecrets.org reveals the Judicial Crisis Network, a conservative secretive dark money group received $22 million from anonymous donors in the year leading up to the Tump administration and conservatives’ push to place Brett Kavanaugh on the U.S. Supreme Court.

$17 million of that $22 million came from one anonymous donor.

“The Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, pledged to spend as much as $10 million to ensure Kavanaugh’s confirmation — the same amount that it spent to help confirm Justice Neil Gorsuch in 2017,” Anna Massoglia and Andrew Perez at OpenSecrets reveal in their report Friday.

View the complete May 18 article by David Badash of the New Civil Rights Movement on the AlterNet website here.

Kavanaugh’s Confirmation Traumatized American Women, Study Shows—And May Have Made Them Less Safe

The Supreme Court Justice’s confirmation hearings left Americans fearful for women’s rights and safety and left many men less likely to believe a woman’s allegations of assault

More than six months after Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh was confirmed by the U.S. Senate, a new study shows how women and men were affected by revelations that the judge had been accused of sexual assault.

The non-partisan research firm PerryUndem surveyed about 1,300 people from across the country, finding that more Americans believe Kavanaugh’s accuser, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, than did directly after the hearings—and that most believe Kavanaugh lied under oath about the alleged assault.

One in four women told the company that watching the hearings in September had caused them to re-experience past trauma. The number was larger for Latin American women, at one in three.

View the complete April 16 article by Julia Conley on the Common Dreams website here.

Senate GOP confirms Kavanaugh’s replacement, Trump’s 36th pick for powerful appeals courts

Senate Republicans on Wednesday confirmed the 36th circuit court judge under President Trump — a rapid clip of confirmations that may slow in the coming months simply because the GOP will have filled all the existing vacancies on the powerful federal appeals courts.

The confirmation of Neomi Rao to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit on a 53-to-46 vote, as well as Paul Matey earlier this week to the Philadelphia-based 3rd Circuit, now means 1 out of every 5 appeals court judge will have been nominated by Trump.

Now, just nine vacancies remain in the circuit courts, which handles the vast majority of cases that never reach the Supreme Court, and Trump has nominated candidates for six of them. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) could muscle through confirmations by midyear, leaving few openings if a Democrat wins the White House in 2020.

View the complete March 13 article by Seung Min Kim on The Washington Post website here.

Unnamed donors gave large sums to conservative nonprofit that funded Trump allies

Wellspring Committee, a politically active nonprofit organization that funds conservative groups and causes, gave $14.8 million last year to Judicial Crisis Network, which spent millions of dollars backing the Supreme Court nominations of Brett M. Kavanaugh and Neil M. Gorsuch, according to tax documents. Credit: Andrew Harnik, AP

Four unidentified donors gave nearly $17 million last year to a conservative nonprofit group that distributed funds to organizations that backed President Trump’s inaugural committee and his Supreme Court nominees Neil M. Gorsuch and Brett M. Kavanaugh, according to tax documents.

Wellspring Committee, a politically active organization that funds conservative causes and groups, received $16.7 million in 2017 from four unnamed donors who gave between $250,000 and $8.9 million each, according to the group’s 2017 tax return, obtained by the advocacy group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics (CREW) in Washington.

During the same period of time, the Northern Virginia-based group gave $14.8 million to another politically active nonprofit organization: the conservative Judicial Crisis Network (JCN), which spent millions of dollars backing the nominations of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.

View the complete November 27 article by Michelle Ye Hee Lee on The Washington Post website here.

Want to Know More About: Justice Brett Kavanaugh

Willie Geist: “If You Thought He Was Partisan In His Testimony Which A Lot Did When He Talked About A Clinton Conspiracy, That Wasn’t Helped By Yesterday’s Event Whatsoever. He Looked Even More Partisan.” SCARBOROUGH: “Wasn’t it Brett Kavanaugh himself that was going down the list, thanking Republican senators, not mentioning anybody else, making it clear that his political allegiance were on one side of the aisle.” GEIST: “If you thought he was partisan in his testimony which a lot did when he talked about a Clinton conspiracy, that wasn’t helped by yesterday’s event whatsoever. He looked even more partisan” [Morning Joe, MSNBC, 10/9/18; VIDEO]

Kristen Welker: “President Trump Was Anything But Unifying. He Further Stoked The Partisan Battle In His Remarks.” WELKER: “Brett Kavanaugh vowed to be a justice for all Americans after that fierce confirmation fight. But president trump was anything but unifying. He further stoked the partisan battle in his remarks. For the president, it was all aimed at energizing Republicans with four weeks until election day.” [Morning Joe, MSNBC, 10/9/18; VIDEO]

Joe Scarborough: “It Was A President Who Once Again Had An Opportunity […] Instead It Ended Up Being A Political Pep Rally.” SCARBOROUGH: “It was a president who once again had an opportunity, not to be the great uniter, not to be Abraham Lincoln after the civil war talking about with malice toward none, but to do a small thing or two, send an olive branch, but he had all the members of the Supreme Court there, including the liberal members of the supreme court, and instead it ended up being a political pep rally.” [Morning Joe, MSNBC, 10/9/18; VIDEO] Continue reading “Want to Know More About: Justice Brett Kavanaugh”

With Kavanaugh confirmation, GOP officially becomes the party of rape

Nearly two years after electing an admitted sexual predator, Republicans voted nearly unanimously to confirm an accused sexual predator to the Supreme Court.

Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh Credit: Saul Loeb, Pool

All but one Senate Republican voted Saturday to confirm credibly accused sexual predator Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, marking the GOP’s embrace of sexual assault and victim shaming.

The vote to install Kavanaugh comes nearly two years after the election of admitted sexual predator Donald Trump, who was accused of sexual assault by more than a dozen women and heard on tape bragging about it.

Since then, Republicans have gone all in on pedophilia, defended the alleged widespread cover-up of sexual assault by a member of their own party, and dropped any pretense of caring about the fact that their party is led by a man who not only admitted to sexually assaulting women, but actually touted it.

View the October 6 article by Caroline Orr on the ShareBlue.com website here.

Text Messages Suggest Kavanaugh Tried to Head Off Sexual Assault Allegations Days Before They Were Public: Report

Kavanaugh previously denied to the Senate that he knew anything about the allegations before they were published.

Credit: BBC News screengrab

Hours after Senate Republicans finally locked up the votes to confirm accused sexual predator Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, a new report from NBC revealed text messages sent to a woman who claims to have witnessed Kavanaugh’s assault on Deborah Ramirez at a college party at Yale:

The texts are a conversation between Kathy Charlton and a mutual friend of Kavanaugh’s who, NBC has confirmed, was identified to the FBI by Ramirez as an eyewitness to the incident. NBC News has received no response to multiple attempts to reach the alleged eyewitness for comment.

The story detailing Ramirez’s accusation was published in The New Yorker on Sept. 23. Charlton told NBC News that, in a phone conversation three days earlier, the former classmate told her Kavanaugh had called him and advised him not to say anything “bad” if the press were to call.

View the complete October 5 article by Matthew Chapman on the AlterNet.org website here.