Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh stands accused of committing sexual assault more than 30 years ago, and many in the news media believe it’s up to him to prove it didn’t happen, even as they admit that will be difficult or even impossible to do.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, negotiated a Thursday hearing in which both Kavanaugh and his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, will testify. According to some in the press, it’s up to Kavanaugh to show he’s innocent, while Ford’s story has found sympathetic ears in the press despite the lack of evidence or even a clear recollection on her part about what happened in 1982.
Washington Post blogger Jennifer Rubin wrote Sunday that it was up to Kavanaugh to “convince the Senate he is fit for the job” and that Republicans should request an FBI investigation to help clear his name.
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Many others agreed that the only way for Kavanaugh to clear his name based on Ford’s unsubstantiated allegations was for the FBI to investigate what happened. Some said the GOP’s unwillingness to call for an FBI probe made Kavanaugh look even more guilty.
Kasie Hunt, MSNBC’s Capitol Hill reporter, added, “If you’re telling the truth already , why wouldn’t you want an FBI investigation that ultimately clears your name?”
CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin said he already believes Kavanaugh’s accusers simply because they have common stories about Kavanaugh assaulting women while he was drunk, even though they could be lying for all he knows.
“It’s all of a piece, it is all consistent with one another,” he said. “Are they all lies? Perhaps. But it certainly has the ring of truth to me.”
Similarly, some in the press argued that Republicans are refusing to let a friend of Kavanaugh’s, Mike Judge, testify in the committee to help clear the nominee’s name. Ford said Judge was in the room when Kavanaugh assaulted her, and MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough said Monday that Judge was being kept from the committee because he might reveal Kavanaugh is guilty.
“It’s very obvious that the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Grassley, does not want to open the door to Judge, who definitely — under any basic fact finding mission, Judge would be brought into testify,” Scarborough said.
Morning Joe co-host Mika Brzezinski replied by asking “why any woman would bring this up unless for some reason, that there was some sense that this did happen,” and Brzezinski wondered “why the Republicans wouldn’t consider calling for an FBI investigation.”
A second accuser came forward in a late Sunday night article for the New Yorker magazine, this time alleging that in their freshman year at Yale, Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at an alcohol-fueled party.
No other witnesses have corroborated either accuser’s account, but even before the second woman came forward, voices in the national media have made it clear it’s up to Kavanaugh to either prove he did nothing wrong or withdraw his name from consideration.
“If Kavanaugh were to ask my advice today — and to be clear, he hasn’t done so — I would tell him he almost certainly should have his nomination withdrawn,” wrote legal analyst Benjamin Wittes on Friday in the Atlantic magazine. “The circumstances in which he should fight this out are, in my view, extremely limited. … I can imagine, in theory, defenses that would meet the high bar I think Kavanaugh needs to clear. But if Kavanaugh cannot present such a defense — even if he truly believes himself innocent, even if he is innocent — the better part of valor is to get out now.”
And in a New York Times op-ed the previous day, Cardoza Law School professor Kate Shaw wrote that “the existence of credible allegations against Judge Kavanaugh should be disqualifying” and that “if members of the Senate conclude that a credible accusation of sexual misconduct has been made against Judge Kavanaugh, that should be enough to disqualify him.”
