A trio of Senate Democrats are pressing White House counsel Don McGahn for answers on his knowledge of a sexual assault allegation leveled against Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s pick for the Supreme Court, by a California professor.
Sens. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn, Doug Jones, D-Ala., and Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., have asked McGahn to answer more than a dozen questions regarding the allegation and a letter, signed by 65 women who knew Kavanaugh in high school, defending him.
“Based on your unique role in choosing and vetting judicial nominees for the administration and shepherding Judge Kavanaugh through the Supreme Court nominations process, we have questions about your knowledge surrounding the allegations against Judge Kavanaugh before they became public last week,” the senators wrote in a letter to McGahn on Tuesday.
McGahn has overseen the judicial selection process in the White House and was visible behind Kavanaugh during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee this month.
He also accompanied Kavanaugh to some of his meetings with members of the Senate throughout the nomination process.
Kavanaugh is facing an allegation of sexual assault by a California professor, Christine Blasey Ford, who said the alleged incident occurred at a party in the early 1980s when Kavanaugh was 17 and she was 15.
Kavanaugh has fervently denied the allegation.
Both Kavanaugh and Ford have been invited to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee at a public hearing scheduled for Monday.
The White House said in a statement that Kavanaugh is prepared and willing to testify, but Ford has so far not responded to the committee regarding the hearing, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, said.
Given McGahn’s role in the judicial selection process, the three Senate Democrats want him to tell them about the extent of his knowledge of the allegations, including whether McGahn investigated Ford’s allegation further.
They are also curious about McGahn’s involvement with the letter signed by 65 women and circulated by the Senate Judiciary Committee after news of the alleged sexual assault first broke last week.
“The timing of this letter is highly suspicious,” Leahy, Blumenthal, and Jones wrote. “The sexual assault allegations against Judge Kavanaugh were first made public on September 13, 2018. Yet this letter was released the very next day. The timing raises questions about whether this letter was drafted or coordinated prior to these allegations becoming public, and, if that is the case, whether individuals in the White House and members of the Senate knew about these allegations earlier than they have admitted.”
The Senate Judiciary Committee said last week, however, that the letter was organized by a group of Kavanaugh’s former clerks just after the allegation was revealed.
The senators, though, want McGahn to tell them what prompted the letter’s drafting, as well as whether any part of the letter was drafted before the allegation was made public last week.
“These questions do not come in a vacuum,” the three Democrats wrote, referencing press reports from this year that McGahn knew about allegations of domestic violence against former White House staff secretary Rob Porter by two of his ex-wives.
“Your apparent failure to properly address allegations of domestic abuse against administration staff raise several questions about the allegations at issue here,” they continued.
The White House has stressed that the allegation involving Kavanaugh never surfaced during the FBI’s repeated vetting of Kavanaugh throughout his tenure working for the federal government.
