White House counselor Kellyanne Conway is a lot of things, but she’s not an idiot.
She is not, for example, so stupid as to compare Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh to accused serial rapist and Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein, as the Washington Post’s Josh Dawsey alleged Monday.
Kellyanne Conway just defended Brett Kavanaugh on a call with White House surrogates, urged them to defend his nomination. Compared judge to “elite media figures” like Les Moonves & Harvey Weinstein who have been accused of sexual harassment/assault, per two people on call.
— Josh Dawsey (@jdawsey1) September 24, 2018
“Kellyanne Conway just defended Brett Kavanaugh on a call with White House surrogates, urged them to defend his nomination. Compared judge to ‘elite media figures’ like [former CBS chair and CEO] Les Moonves & Harvey Weinstein who have been accused of sexual harassment/assault, per two people on call,” the Post’s White House reporter tweeted.
Dawsey added in a follow-up tweet that “Kellyanne said that none of the accusations about Kavanaugh were not proven & that so many accusations about elite media figures were worse & proven.”
He stated later, “Her argument was that Kavanaugh’s accusations were a long time ago & unproven while other men like Moonves/Weinstein were more recent & proven.”
But this is not what Conway said, according to a recording obtained by the Washington Examiner.
In response to a White House surrogate asking for guidance on feeling “bullied,” Conway made the same point in the off-the-record conference call that she made earlier Monday morning on CBS News, which is this: It’s “rich” for the news media to go hard after the unverified allegations against Kavanaugh, considering that the very same media companies turned a blind eye to far more convincing allegations of sexual misconduct committed by men in the news media.
“I think it’s very, very important to not be bullied, and they are the ones doing the bullying is really rich. That’s where I think this should all head. If I were you, that’s what I’d talk about,” Conway said during the call. “Including this [new rumor against Kavanaugh], because the industry that’s been the hardest hit — there’s no any industry harder hit than media over allegations, credible allegations, contemporaneous allegations, women have had their lives and careers ruined by powerful men in media.”
“So, the idea that they secret-ed, they protected Les Moonves, and Matt Lauer, and Harvey Weinstein — they protected and looked the other way for decades at these powerful men!” she said, adding later, “We are not going to allow them to do a drive-by hit job over a man who’s not Les Moonves. Who is not Harvey Weinstein. Who’s not all these other folks, Matt Lauer and others. We cannot allow that, ladies and gentlemen.”
A White House aide confirmed that the above quotes are accurate and complete.
Conway’s not wrong about there being a chasm between the allegations against Lauer, Moonves, etc. and the allegations against Kavanaugh. For starters, for nearly every member of the news media outed by the #MeToo movement, there has also been a trail of corroborating witness testimony. In some cases, there have even been police reports and hospital records.
With Kavanaugh, on the other hand, there has been no corroboration, and both accusations involve events that occurred in the early 1980s. So far, both Kavanaugh accusations have been denied by all of the corroborating witnesses whom the accusers themselves placed at the scenes of the alleged incidents.
But let’s not lose sight of the main thing here: Conway at no point “compared” Kavanaugh to Weinstein. She did exactly the opposite, contrasting the two, and attempting to shame the media for coddling and failing to discipline its own verifiable harassers and abusers for so long.
