The latest salvo in the Left’s and the media’s endless assault on Justice Brett Kavanaugh comes from Max Stier, a Beltway-based attorney who represented President Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. According to the New York Times’ relaying of the controversial new book, The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation, the Yale graduate claims to have seen Kavanaugh at a dorm party “where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.”
The story is thinly sourced and the alleged victim denied the allegation through multiple friends (a fact the Times omitted in its original story). Given that the poorly sourced charge is so explosive, it’s hard to imagine the Times would run this allegation against almost any other target. To justify publishing an uncorroborated, largely debunked, 30-year-old accusation by a political operative, the Times tries to make it a story about how Stier’s accusation was handled by authorities.
But on this meta-story, the reporters also left out an important fact. While Stier, the Democratic operative, told the FBI of the allegation, he never told the main authority responsible for litigating the matter publicly: the office of Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley — at least according to staffers who worked the confirmation process.
The Washington Post, which also reported that Grassley’s office never received the allegation, reports that Democratic Senator Chris Coons wrote a letter to the FBI asking them to investigate the matter, which would imply that Stier informed both the FBI and a minority member of the Judiciary Committee, but not the chairman responsible for publicly handling the Kavanaugh case. (Coons’ office did not respond to a query on this.)
So Stier claims to have seen other people shove Kavanaugh’s penis into the hand of a woman who multiple people say denies it, and he thought this such a disqualifying and urgent matter that instead of alerting the one office with the immediate power to publicly investigate it in a show-trial that implicitly employed a preponderance of evidence, he alerted the FBI, which thought the story so uncorroborated that the premier independent investigatory body of the nation declined to pursue it.
Hardly convincing stuff.
