Disgraced former Sen. Al Franken “got railroaded” by partisan actors and overzealous #MeToo activists, according to the woman who co-authored one of the most unethical and sloppy hit jobs on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
The only thing thicker than the irony of the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer penning a 12,434-word defense of the former Minnesota senator is her total lack of self-awareness. Remember: Mayer is one of two reporters who introduced the world to Deborah Ramirez’s absurd and unverified allegation that Kavanaugh exposed himself during a drinking game when they were both students at Yale.
“Franken’s fall was stunningly swift: he resigned only three weeks after Leeann Tweeden, a conservative talk-radio host, accused him of having forced an unwanted kiss on her during a 2006 U.S.O. tour,” Mayer writes in an article titled “The Case of Al Franken.”
On that same USO tour, Franken posed for a photo wherein he pantomimed groping Tweeden’s breasts. She was asleep when the photo was taken. After Tweeden went public with her allegation, seven additional women came forward to accuse the senator of unwanted touching and kissing. After a brief period of denial, Franken’s Democratic colleagues decided that eight accusers were eight too many, and they pressured the embittered and unrepentant former lawmaker to resign from the U.S. Senate.
Mayer believes the former senator got a raw deal. She goes to great lengths to discredit his chief accuser, Tweeden, who reportedly declined to be interviewed for the New Yorker story, while also casting Franken as a cartoonishly sympathetic figure
Mayer allows for Franken to say of Tweenden’s version of events that it is “just not true.” Mayer quotes Franken’s “longtime fund-raiser,” who claims the former senator is “five hundred per cent devoted” to his wife. Mayer even writes of the seven other women who have accused Franken of sexual misconduct, “Only two incidents were alleged to have happened after Franken was elected to the Senate.” Mayer quotes former special assistant to the Sergeant Major of the Army Shajn Cabrera, who says the photo of Franken pretending to grope Tweeden “was not at all malicious” and that the former senator was just “goofing around.” Mayer also quotes Cabrera as saying, “No complaints were ever addressed to the Sergeant Major of the Army, and our job was to make sure everyone was happy!” Mayer quotes comedian Sarah Silverman as saying, “This isn’t Kavanaugh. It isn’t Roy Moore.” Mayer even cites noted liar and former Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, who said, “It’s terrible what happened to him. It was unfair. It took the legs out from under him. He was a very fine senator.”
If you can believe it, the New Yorker article even ends with Mayer quoting the attorney who represented Kavanaugh’s chief accuser Christine Blasey Ford:
Mayer’s attempt to salvage Franken’s career whiplashes incoherently between arguing he is innocent and that what he did (if he did it!) is not as bad as it sounds. She dismisses the photographic evidence corroborating Tweeden’s allegations of misconduct. Mayer glosses over the seven additional accusations leveled against Franken, ignoring outright that many of the women have provided contemporaneous corroboration. Mayer fails to report that Franken himself admitted he had “crossed a line for some women.” Mayer’s story, which is light on exculpatory facts concerning Franken’s alleged behavior, gives no good reason to disbelieve his accusers. And Franken’s defenses, which he had nearly 18 months to prepare, are weak and self-centered.
But these are not even the most absurd aspects of Mayer’s report. The most absurd thing is that the story carries her name.
Nearly everything she highlights in her report to conclude that Franken “got railroaded” — the supposed holes in the accusers’ allegations, the possibility that Franken’s behavior toward women was just “goofing around,” flattering details of his family life, et cetera — can be argued more convincingly for Kavanaugh, whom the New Yorker reporter tried her damndest to destroy during his confirmation hearings.
Last September, Mayer and Ronan Farrow reported that Kavanaugh exposed himself to Ramirez when they were in college. Ramirez herself claims she does not quite remember the incident. The “primary witness” to the alleged act claimed he did not see it happen, but that he had heard about it from a secondhand source. That supposed secondhand source told Mayer and Farrow that he had no memory of such an incident, or of even hearing or saying anything about it. Farrow and Mayer published their stories anyway, even though they conceded they could not corroborate any of it. Mayer admitted later in an interview with Elle that her “reporting” was done with an eye to establishing “a pattern of similar behavior,” not on figuring out whether Ramirez’s tale had any truth to it.
Yet here she is this week with a long, long article arguing Franken was “railroaded” by his eight accusers. The woman who wasted no time publishing Ramirez’s unverified and uncorroborated allegations against Kavanaugh is poring over Tweeden’s story as if it were the Zapruder film.
It is just a total coincidence, I am sure, that Mayer’s sense of skepticism and her ability to scrutinize allegations of sexual impropriety reappeared just in time for her to do a glossy profile on a disgraced former Democratic senator.
I am sure the fact that Franken’s name has a “D” next to it in no way influenced Mayer’s reporting on this matter. Nope. No way.
