A newly revealed allegation about Brett Kavanaugh comes from Clinton impeachment defense lawyer Max Stier.
The alleged victim told friends she doesn’t remember the incident.
Judge Brett Kavanaugh faced two main allegations during his Supreme Court confirmation process. California professor Christine Blasey Ford claimed Kavanaugh and a classmate of his attempted to sexually assault her in a Maryland suburb home in high school. Kavanaugh denies the incident occurred, and the other alleged attendees of the the party named by Ford all deny any recollection of the event, including Ford’s friend Leland Keyser, who now says she doubts the incident ever happened.
Deborah Martinez, who alleged that Kavanaugh put his penis in her face at a freshman year party at Yale, causing her to inadvertently touch it when she swatted it away. Kavanaugh denies that incident as well, and none of the three alleged witnesses to the event named by Ramirez have supported her claim.
The new allegation by Stier was revealed in a Sunday essay by New York Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly previewing their forthcoming book, The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation. The Washington Examiner obtained a copy of the book, published by Portfolio, before its wider release Tuesday.
“We also uncovered a previously unreported story about Mr. Kavanaugh in his freshman year that echoes Ms. Ramirez’s allegation,” Pogrebin and Kelly wrote on Sunday. “A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.”
The article led to almost immediate calls for impeachment from leading Democratic presidential candidates and others. The New York Times, under pressure online from conservatives, added an editor’s note Sunday evening that stated “the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident.”
The article described Stier as someone who “runs a nonprofit organization in Washington,” and the book by Pogrebin and Kelly described him as “a respected thought leader on federal government management issues in Washington as the founding president and chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service.”
But it wasn’t in that capacity that Stier first found himself at odds with Kavanaugh.
While Kavanaugh worked on independent counsel Ken Starr’s lengthy and contentious investigation into President Bill Clinton, ultimately helping author the Starr Report and its impeachment referral, Stier worked on Clinton’s impeachment defense team and helped the embattled president fight charges of perjury flowing from his false denials about an affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
“The Framers, in their wisdom, left this Body the solemn obligation of determining not what is sinful, but rather what is impeachable,” Stier and the rest of Clinton’s legal team told the House Judiciary Committee in 1998. “The President has not sugar-coated the reality of his wrongdoing. Neither should the Committee ignore the high standards of the Constitution to overturn a national election and to impeach a President.”
Pogrebin and Kelly also claimed in their essay that Stier “notified senators and the F.B.I. about this account, but the F.B.I. did not investigate.” Staffers for Sen. Chuck Grassley, then-chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee directly overseeing the Kavanaugh confirmation, told the Washington Examiner that Stier never informed them about this allegation. The Washington Post reported Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, sent the allegation to FBI Director Christopher Wray. But Grassley’s office said it had not been made aware of the specifics of the claim.
Pogrebin and Kelly also noted that “Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly” and claimed that they had “corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier.” But that appears to be a corroboration that Stier had made this claim, not corroboration from any other witnesses to the incident or from the alleged victim herself.
If the allegation is true, it would mean Stier knew for decades but didn’t speak up.
Pogrebin and Kelly didn’t weigh in on the veracity of Stier’s claim in their book, but they did assert that the allegations from both Ford and Ramirez “ring true.” Ford’s friend Keyser told the authors, “I don’t have any confidence in the story.”
And although Pogrebin and Kelly asserted that they found five people with a “strong recollection of hearing about the incident” with Ramirez and Kavanaugh before Kavanaugh became a judge, none of those people were eyewitnesses, one only heard vague details of “something [that] happened at Yale” in which Kavanaugh wasn’t named, and another was told within a decade of it allegedly happening. Two other people mentioned by Pogrebin and Kelly “vaguely remember hearing about something happening to Ramirez during freshman year.”
“The people who allegedly witnessed the event — Kavanaugh’s friends Kevin Genda, David Todd, and David White — have kept mum about it,” Pogrebin and Kelly wrote in their book. “Kavanaugh has denied it.”
But this claim from the New York Times reporters is not accurate. The 2018 article in the New Yorker that originally reported Ramirez’s claim noted that “in a statement, two of those male classmates who Ramirez alleged were involved in the incident, the wife of a third male student she said was involved, and one other classmate, Dan Murphy, disputed Ramirez’s account of events.”
“We can say with confidence that if the incident Debbie alleges ever occurred, we would have seen or heard about it —and we did not,” the 2018 statement read in part. “Editors from the New Yorker contacted some of us because we are the people who would know the truth, and we told them that we never saw or heard about this.”
