Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell dismissed porn star lawyer Michael Avenatti on the Senate floor Tuesday for trying to topple Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
Avenatti represents Julie Swetnick, who claimed Kavanaugh was at a party where she was gang raped, and said she saw Kavanaugh act inappropriately toward women. Those accusations have not been verified, and Kavanaugh has rejected them, just as McConnell did on the Senate floor.
“A tabloid lawyer organized a red-carpet rollout for someone who wanted to accuse Judge Kavanaugh of masterminding some kind of high school drug and serial sexual assault ring, hosting one wild party after another filled with sexual violence, for which there conveniently happened to be zero witnesses,” McConnell said.
“This didn’t stay in the tabloids, by the way,” McConnell said. “This fantastic story was effectively read into the record of the judiciary committee by the ranking member, who decided it deserved a mention in her remarks during last Thursday’s hearing.”
He said efforts by Democrats to use those unsubstantiated claims show how “desperate” they’ve become to stop Kavanaugh. “I guess upholding any standards of any kind was just too much to ask,” he said.
[Opinion: New York Times’ dud of a Kavanaugh bombshell co-authored by admitted anti-Kavanaugh partisan]
McConnell added that a new report saying Kavanaugh threw ice at someone in a bar in 1985 is just more “mud and muck” being flung by detractors and the media, and said those stories wouldn’t stop the Senate from voting on Kavanaugh this week.
“Last night, the New York Times unleashed this major story — get this — Judge Kavanaugh may have been accused of throwing some ice across a college bar in the mid-1980s — in the mid-1980s,” McConnell said. “Talk about a bombshell. One can only imagine what new bombshell might be published today or tomorrow.”
He repeated his Monday announcement that the Senate “will vote on Judge Kavanaugh here on the floor this week,” after the conclusion of an additional FBI background check into some of the accusations against Kavanaugh.
McConnell said the first sexual assault allegation to be levied against Kavanaugh, by Christine Blasey Ford, has led to “floodgates of mud and muck opened entirely on Brett Kavanaugh and his family.”
