Published by MSNBC on Sep 28, 2018
MSNBC’s Chief Legal Correspondent, Ari Melber, gives his definitive take on Kavanaugh’s hearing and what he revealed. Melber notes how during his testimony, Kavanaugh’s mask fell, as he went from blasting a political party to darkly alleging conspiracy theories and political hit jobs he can’t prove. Kavanaugh’s testimony ultimately became the most direct partisan language a Supreme Court nominee has ever used in a confirmation hearing in the modern era.
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By happenstance I wound up hearing most of the Senate testimony from both Christine Blasey Ford and Brett Kavanaugh. Ford was impressive and persuasive from start to finish. Kavanaugh surprised me, at first blush he was convincing, but then he kept the drama queen anguish going a bit too much. Worst he repeated himself again and again as if glued to a script.
Then refusing to invite an FBI investigation, that really produced some of the drama. Specially Senator Durbin questioning Kavanaugh https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KCBOJZMxNDQ – starts at 2:00, then after 3:00 min, the guy does mooshup, pathetic. Here he got me back to seeing the spoiled brat, now busted and facing consequences for the first time. It’s pathetically typical and predictable, look at him, one can almost smell him shitting himself.
Allegations of sexual misconduct aside, the guy doesn’t belong on real court bench, he’s a partisan animal, not a judge. As for the allegations, considering his brag about being the high school jock seems like it fits right in with being a bit of an opportunistic sexual predator, so he made no points with that self-description. I hope the FBI does get involved and figure out who's lying.
By Sean Wilentz, professor of history at Princeton.
Helaine Olen, The Washington Post
Charles Pierce, Esquire
Published by Mercury News on Sep 27, 2018
Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh refused to call for the Federal Bureau of Investigations to reopen its inquiry into his background after Senator Dick Durban (D-Illinois) asked him to request that through White House counsel Don McGahn in a Senate Judiciary meeting on Thursday Sept. 27, 2018.
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The staggering hypocrisy of Brett Kavanaugh
Helaine Olen, The Washington Post
Published 10:04 am PDT, Monday, September 24, 2018
But there is something else worth remembering, too. Kavanaugh was not only a part of special counsel Ken Starr's investigation into President Bill Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky; he was also one of the lead Torquemadas of it - zealous in the pursuit of his goal to the point of cruelty. If Kavanaugh's nomination survives till Thursday's scheduled Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, at least one senator should ask him why he thought it was so necessary to ask Clinton such graphic questions about Lewinsky.
Let me be clear: Kavanaugh not only thought Clinton needed to be questioned about his relations with Lewinsky; he also wanted Clinton to be interrogated in the most detailed and specific way possible. He drew up a memo with a series of 10 sexually explicit questions about Clinton's relationship with Lewinsky. He claimed he wanted to establish Clinton had no defense for his "pattern of behavior." As a result, "[the] idea of going easy on him at the questioning is thus abhorrent to me," Kavanaugh wrote in the summer of 1998.
To say that the questions Kavanaugh came up with for Clinton were prurient doesn't do justice to the gross invasiveness and detail he sought. These queries …
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Brett Kavanaugh Was Involved in 3 Different Crises of Democracy
All of which he used to benefit himself.
BY CHARLES P. PIERCE - AUG 3, 2018
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a22638554/brett-kavanaugh-vince-foster-investigation/
Of all the perilous nonsense involved in the Great Penis Hunt of 1998, the most singularly indecent episode was the relentless fishing expedition into the suicide of Vincent Foster, the first White House counsel of the Clinton administration. On July 23, 1993, Foster shot himself…
(now 1995) Subsequent investigations failed to stop the onslaught.
In fact, it was this conclusion that was partly responsible for Fiske's being replaced by Kenneth Starr, who, because he is Kenneth Starr and a hack, opened the investigation again and handed it off to an ambitious lawyer in his office named...Brett Kavanaugh. From The Washington Post (emphasis added):
In early 1995, however, Kavanaugh offered his boss, independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr, the legal rationale for expanding his investigation of the Arkansas financial dealings of President Bill Clinton and his wife, Hillary, to include the Foster death, according to a memo he wrote on March 24, 1995. Kavanaugh, then 30, argued that unsupported allegations that Foster may have been murdered gave Starr the right to probe the matter more deeply. Foster’s death had already been the focus of two investigations, both concluding that Foster committed suicide.
“We are currently investigating Vincent Foster’s death to determine, among other things, whether he was murdered in violation of federal criminal law,” Kavanaugh wrote to Starr and six other officials in a memo offering legal justification for the probe. “[I]t necessarily follows that we must have the authority to fully investigate Foster’s death.” …
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Why Was Kavanaugh Obsessed With Vince Foster?
He needs to explain why he followed right-wing conspiracy theories about the White House aide’s suicide.
By Sean Wilentz
Mr. Wilentz is a professor of history at Princeton.
Sept. 5, 2018
Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee to replace Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, has testified to the Senate that “a good judge must be an umpire — a neutral and impartial arbiter.” He and his supporters want us to believe that he would be such an umpire on the Supreme Court. But does his record support him? The refusal of the Senate Judiciary Committee majority to share thousands of highly pertinent documents naturally raises skepticism.
But there is plenty already in the public record about which Judge Kavanaugh has yet to be held accountable.
Anticipating the imminent publication of Kenneth Starr’s memoir of the Clinton impeachment, I looked into Judge Kavanaugh’s files in the Office of Independent Counsel records, housed in the National Archives.
What I discovered sheds light on how Mr. Kavanaugh made his way in his early career, and how he flagrantly breached his role as a neutral public servant and followed the imperatives of a political operative.
Mr. Kavanaugh served under Mr. Starr as associate independent counsel between 1994 and 1997, and then again in 1998. …
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