The U.S. Supreme Court helped launch the Brett Kavanaugh era on Oct. 10 by curtailing the voting of Native Americans in North Dakota, where a tight Senate race threatens a Democrat who voted against Kavanaugh's recent confirmation.

The court enabled a new state rule barring voters who use for election purposes Post Office boxes instead of street addresses. Many Native Americans living on reservations use only PO Boxes and have heavily supported Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, below, the incumbent Democrat who is now an underdog in her race.

The court's refusal to intervene follows its recent practice of avoiding review for the most part of voter suppression and gerrymandering efforts by Republican state officials who have taken major steps recently to reduce voter registrations and polling place en masse in ways that heavily disadvantage Democrats in November.

In the North Dakota case, five votes were needed from the nine justices. Kavanaugh, shown in a White House-promoted political-type photo of a kind unusual for a sitting justice, did not participate for unexplained reasons, presumably because of his busy schedule getting installed onto the court.

Several columns this week describe a looming legal crisis regarding election-rigging in next month's elections and beyond.

Update: Trump Administration Seeks to Stifle Protests Near White House and on National Mall.

Investigative reporter Greg Palast, who documented for the BBC in 2001 how Republicans had stolen the 2000 presidential election by eliminating the names of more than 100,000 suspected Democrats from voter rolls (and not by the few ballots with hanging "chads" described by the American media), published several investigations regarding secret cutbacks in 2018 voter rolls by Republican secretaries of state seeking to tilt next month's elections.

For example, he wrote for Truthout in GOP’s Brian Kemp Purged 1 in 10 Georgia Voters: I’ve Got the Names. "My lawyer had to threaten Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp with a federal lawsuit to force him to turn over the names of over half a million voters whose citizenship rights he quietly extinguished," Palast began. "This past week, I released the name of every one of these Georgia voters Kemp flushed from voter rolls in 2017."

Yet all such legal actions and reporting is based on the increasingly quaint theory that federal courts will honestly address the election issues and not just endorse Republican vote suppression by 5-4 party line votes by justices installed like Kavanaugh after long involvement in extreme partisan politics, including dirty tricks at election time.

Taking another broad view, investigative reporter Wayne Madsen linked Kavanaugh with presidential election rigging in the United States with Karl Rove and in the Ukraine with Paul Manafort in 2004, as portrayed above right and as described in his column Exclusive Investigative Commentary: Bush backed Kavanaugh to keep election thefts of 2000 and 2004 a secret.

The column, based on Madsen's years of covering election frauds, linked Kavanaugh and Republican U.S. Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee to the Bush dynasty and its election-rigging operation headquartered in Chattanooga, TN,  where Corker was mayor before his 2006 election to the senate.

Madsen thereby explained the all-out Bush team pressure that kept such supposed "moderates" as Corker and former Bush appointee Susan Collins as strong Kavanaugh supporters despite their supposed willingness to weigh evidence fairly about  allegations against the nominee. Collins is married to Thomas Daffron, a lobbyist with deep ties to the Bush administration and powerful corporations.

Also, Ohio-based investigative reporters/authors Robert Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman published Will the Trump GOP Strip and Flip America's 2018 Election While the Democrats Fail to Protect the Vote?

Earlier this week, President Trump invited the newest justice and his family to the White House to reenact the official weekend swearing-in ceremony.

With Trump front and center and denouncing Democrats, the White House ceremony became a highly partisan attack by the president on "mobs" of protesters against the nominee.

Democrats and other protesters must be defeated at the polls in next month's elections to maintain law and order, the president urged as the new justice looked on during the celebration — thereby horrifying both Democrats and others who think presidents and judges should at least pretend to be non-partisan on formal occasions.

The spectacle was an especially flagrant disregard of norms for a non-partisan judiciary independent of party or president. That's because Kavanaugh, doubtless now deeply indebted to Trump, has argued that a president should not have to undergo civil or criminal litigation.

Yet Kavanaugh had been one of the most aggressive prosecutors against a president in United States history while working for Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr in the 1990s to impeach Democratic President Bill Clinton over allegations of a consensual dalliance with Monica Lewinsky.

A former counsel for the Bush-Cheney campaign during its recount vote theft and Supreme Court battle in 2000, Kavanaugh is shown in a Twitter photo celebrating at the White House this week with Matt Schlapp, one of the "Brooks Brothers" rioters (GOP DC operatives pretending to be Florida voters), and Schlaap's wife Mercedes Schlapp, deputy Trump White House communications dDirector. Her husband is head of the American Conservative Union and a frequent TV cable commnentator advocating for the Trump Administration and its goals

Meanwhile, other Republicans joined the fray this week by insisting that Democrats and other critics should get over their suspicions about Kavanaugh and the confirmation process — even as Senate Majority Leaders Mitch McConnell floated the idea that Republicans deserve to replace in 2020 any justice who leaves the court that year.

That might enhance the court's already unprecedented 5-4 majority of hard-right Republicans able to enact throughout the nation's federal courts any legal policy that the majority wants.

In sum, such developments recall the now-discredited, but once-common, advice nostrum to rape victims: Don't fight back.

Instead, it's now time to draw larger lessons now that Kavanaugh has been confirmed as the court's newest, most partisan, most disgraced and most dangerous member.

Most important to remember: Republicans led a sham FBI background check and Senate confirmation hearing that prevented meaningful review of Kavanaugh's multiple seeming perjuries. The corrupt process and the fakery involved by important participants illustrate several massive dangers.

1. Kavanaugh has been installed as a radical right wrecking ball against traditional norms of impartial justice and rule of law; and
2. Even more disturbing, a massive fraudulent process has been exposed yet again whereby dirty tricks fueled by dark money overwhelms traditional checks-and-balances and free press safeguards enacted in the U.S. Constitution.

Today's column amplifies these themes based on our Justice Integrity Project (JIP) coverage of the confirmation hearing and relevant news/commentary. The commentary is excerpted below and on our specialized news sub-sites, including JIP Supreme Court (SCOTUS) Review and JIP #MeToo and Assault Allegations.

The material already exceeds book length. So we shall focus on a few key themes at a time and update also the action agenda we proposed on Sept. 26 in Five Ways To Thwart GOP Court Fraud.

We are already poised for steps Four (Ensure that at least one branch of Congress has a Democratic majority able to conduct an honest investigation since Republicans have failed to undertake them in the branches that they control).

And then comes Step Five (Cite the available evidence to expose Kavanaugh and his enablers before seeking the appropriate sanctions). Sanctions could include disbarment, civil and criminal litigation, and potentially impeachment.

Prominent members of the scandal-stricken Roman Catholic legal leadership in the District of Columbia convened on Sunday for the annual Red Mass that provides a spiritual kick-off to the new Supreme Court term and the legal community's public aspirations for justice.

The ceremony was majestic as usual but unfolded before a slightly smaller audience than normal and under the shadow of unfolding scandal involving the local Catholic-reared Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

Cardinal Donald Wuerl, left, was absent from the mass, which he has normally led for most of his 12-year tenure in Washington. Instead, he has recently been awaiting possible sanction from the Vatican for his alleged role in covering-up sexual offenses by priests in Pittsburgh, one of the cardinal's previous postings.

As usual, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts led a delegation from the court to the ceremonies at the historic Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle and a subsequent brunch.

But Roberts was accompanied by only two of the associate judges, Republican Catholic Clarence Thomas and Stephen Breyer, a Democrat of the Jewish faith.

This editor has attended the Red Mass and brunch a number of times previously and so is in position to comment on its history, inspiring ceremonial and spiritual aspects, as well as some of the embarrassing but largely unspoken undercurrents.

The event first launched in 1928 at the St. Andrews Church in New York City, in 1953 at St. Matthews in the District of Columbia and in a number of other metro areas around the United States.

The event in the nation's capital has attracted the U.S. presidential attendance and more commonly during recent years a majority of the Supreme Court Justices, sometimes including multiple non-Catholics.

The Court in recent years has included six justices reared as Roman Catholics and three Jewish members. Kavanaugh, schooled at the Jesuit school Georgetown Prep, would be another Catholic if confirmed.

But his status is in peril following numerous claims of sexual assault and lying under oath that are surfacing. Kavanaugh has denied wrongdoing (as we and others have reported extensively elswhere, including here) and was not reported as present at the mass on Sunday.

Publically, the mass unfolded as a spiritual and civic occasion framed by the magnificant cathedral and stirring Biblical readings, sacred music and other religious trappings.

The Senate Judiciary Committee approved Brett Kavanaugh's nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court by a party line 11-10 vote on Sept. 28 but agreed also to let a key member negotiate for up to a week's delay for an FBI investigation before the nomination goes to the full Senate.

In a dramatic reversal Friday, Republican Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona, right, announced that he sought an FBI probe of sexual misconduct investigations before a vote by the full Senate, where Republicans hold a 51-49 majority.

Breaking News: Trump orders limits on FBI probe of Kavanaugh. Accuser Julie Swetnick's attorney responds:

"If true, this is outrageous," wrote Avenatti. "Why are Trump and his cronies in the Senate trying to prevent the American people from learning the truth? Why do they insist on muzzling women with information submitted under penalty of perjury? Why Ramirez but not my client?"

Two other undecided senators, Republican Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia, announced that they would join Flake's position. That would put Kavanaugh's final approval in doubt if other senators vote as expected nearly along party lines.

As one sign of that, Senators Joe Donnelly of Indiana and Jon Tester of Montana, two Democrats facing re-election in November in heavily Republican states, announced that they would oppose Kavanaugh.

Their decisions followed the powerful testimony on Friday by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, a California research professor in psychology. She alleged that Kavanaugh had tried to forcibly rape her when she was 15 and he was 17.

Kavanaugh angrily denied the allegation at a nine-hour committee hearing.

Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh are shown in file photos taking their oaths before their separate testimony in Thursday's hearing.

Meanwhile, MSNBC host Lawrence O'Donnell broadcast a compelling filmed report showing in a visual way how Flake was affected on Friday morning by protesters and by his Democratic committee colleague Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware, leading to a rare compromise on the committee. O'Donnell, a former senate staffer, drew on his considerable experience for the powerful segment.

Separately, independent researchers have been busy identifying potential clues that are drawn from the hearing and other evidence.

@Soyachika, the Twitter name for a longtime sexual assault researcher, published results of a search that sought to identify a house that could have been the locale for an assault of the kind that Blasey Ford described. Also, @Soyachika located a book publisher's announcement stating that author Mark Judge was available for interviews.

Blasey Ford has said that Judge, a close friend of Kavanaugh's during high school, was present during the nominee's assault on her. Judge has denied any memory of such an incident and has asked not to be interviewed.

Democrats have repeatedly demanded a thorough investigation to include an FBI interview of Judge. His attorney consented to such an interview Saturday if the FBI so desires.

Democrats repeatedly protested during the hearing and before the Saturday's vote that the committee's confirmation process has failed to investigate the allegations adequately.  

Brett Kavanaugh gave his endangered Supreme Court nomination new life on Sept. 27 with apparently perjured testimony and by playing the victim during a hearing on sexual assault charges that was rigged by his Republican backers.

Kavanaugh's emotional mixture of self-pitying tears, obvious lies and belligerence towards Democratic senators followed President Trump's rhetorical model of "deny, deny, deny" and vicious political partisanship.

Update: The Senate Judiciary Committee meeting approved by a party line 11-10 vote the Kavanaugh nomination but with Republican Senator Jeff Flake of Arizona announcing in a dramatic reversal that his Senate floor vote would be contingent on an FBI investigation of up to one week on sexual misconduct allegations against the candidate.

Trump, formally accused by 19 women of sexual assault or other sexual misconduct, portrayed himself as a victim in a rambling, 80-minute press conference on Sept. 26 in which he complained about mistreatment of Kavanaugh.

The nominee, shown in an NBC News photo at left Thursday snarling his comments at Democrats, delivered a hoked-up temper tantrum that appeared to salvage his hopes for his confirmation following three major accusations of sexual misconduct and Kavanaugh's robotic performance on Monday night during a Fox television interview.

The interview came after Fox News commentators Mike Wallace and Brit Hume had described the nominee's accuser Christine Brasey Ford as highly credible in her earlier sworn testimony. 

The majority of the Senate Judiciary Committee scheduled a vote on the nomination for 9:30 a.m. Friday, Sept. 28.

Dr. Brasey, right, told the committee that she was "100 percent" certain that Kavanaugh had been  the drunken teenager who had tried to rape her at a party when she was 15, thereby inflicting lifelong emotional trauma.

Several former prosecutors now serving as cable television commentators, including Cynthia Aksne and Daniel Goldman on MSNBC, described the witness's mixture of first-person experience and expertise as a psychologist as the most effective witness that they had ever seen.

The witness said that she remained reluctant to step forward publicly until reporters began storming her home and workplace earlier this month.

At times during her testimony, she choked up as she described that she was "terrified" at the concept of reliving the trauma of what she called an attempted rape at a teenagers' house party in 1982. During the ordeal, she said she had feared being accidentally choked to death when, she says, Kavanaugh attempted to silence her with a hand over her mouth while she screamed.

Kavanaugh, a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals judge in the District of Columbia, began his afternoon testimony by weeping repeatedly as he denounced Democrats for what he called smearing him and ruining his family and career.

Snowflake Kavanaugh Whines, Ducks FBI Probe

Democrats repeatedly pressed Kavanaugh on whether he would join them in requesting an FBI investigation of missing witnesses and other evidence to clear up questions on whether he or his accuser was more credible.

Kavanaugh, while complaining about false claims, ducked the question every time, saying he would defer to "the committee."

Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, angrily intervened by insisting there was no need for an FBI investigation because the committee staff had already undertaken all necessary investigation.

Not surprisingly, Grassley failed to note that the committee staff was controlled by the majority and had been caught in several mini-scandals congruent with a hearing procedures rigged to heavily favor the Republican nominee and without normal input from the Democratic minority.

As indicated by the Fox News graphic at left, Grassley has been complaining about the confirmation process even though he has been strong-arming it by withholding vast quantities of documents and cooperation with the minority party normal in Senate confirmation inquiries.

The Grassley committee scandals include the vow of committee chief of staff Mike Davis that Kavanaugh would be confirmed no matter what the evidence. Also, the committee had had to fire its temporary staffer Garrett Ventry, loaned to the committee from the right-wing firm CRC Public Relations, after it was revealed that Ventry had been fired because of sexual harassment on his previous job.

Ventry and the committee's integrity had also been compromised because CRC Public Relations has been handling the main national advertising from the Judicial Crisis Network advocating Kavanaugh's confirmation and for Edward Whelan, a think tank president caught trying to blame an innocent man for the attempted rape of Blasey.

So, any reference to a committee investigation as fair was preposterous on its face.

Among the Grassley-ordered procedures was for Republicans to use a sex crimes prosecutor, Rachel Mitchell of Arizona, to ask questions on behalf of the all-male GOP majority.

But the chairman suddenly granted GOP Sen. Lindsay Graham of South Carolina extra time to replace Mitchell, which  Graham proceeded to do with his angry and insulting partisan tirade against Democrats.

This was shortly Democratic Senator Dick Durbin of Illinois had challenged Kavanaugh on why he did not want an FBI investigation.

Then Mitchell appeared to have established a damaging admission from Kavanaugh that his calendars from 1982, which the nominee cited to show he could not possibly have been at a party with Brasey, seemed to show an evening on July 1 when he met with his friend Mark Judge and others for an evening that could have fit the circumstances.

Brasey alleged that Judge was present in the bedroom with Kavanaugh during the attempted rape.

Slate described the pivotal moment in Thursday's hearing in its column There’s an Entry on Kavanaugh’s 1982 Calendar That Supports Ford’s Story Better Than His Own. Another commentator wrote of this pivotal juncture:

The moment Rachel Mitchell squeezed Kavanaugh to admit that "skis" was an oblique reference to beer, and seeing the name "Judge" in that July 1 entry, Lindsay Graham immediately realized that Mitchell was doing her job too well; that's when Graham and his majority agreed to breach their own procedure of supposedly having Mitchell examine BOTH WITNESSES.

Judge, who wrote a book about his debauched youth, has denied via a statement from his lawyer to the committee that he was present at any party with Kavanaugh and Brasey. But judge has been hiding at a beach house unwilling to testify despite repeated demands and requests from Democrats to have him interviewed by trained FBI investigators and brought before the committee and cross-examined.

A new accuser has named Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on Sept. 26 as being present during her long ago gang rape at a party.

But justice seekers need much tougher tactics to counter the ruthless senators and their puppet masters who are now ramming the nominee through to confirmation without an honest investigation.

This column argues that reformers need to implement five strategies beginning today before the sham Senate hearing that is scheduled Thursday for new accusations against Kavanaugh. The column has been updated after being published early on Wednesday, Sept. 26 before attorney Michael Avenatti announced explosive charges against Kavanaugh by a named client.

Later that morning, Avenatti released via Twitter a sworn statement by a longtime federal employee, Julie Swetnick, identifying Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge as being present for a “gang rape” that Swetnick said victimized her at one one of about of about 10 house parties she says that she attended with them in the Washington, DC area in the early 1980s.

“I also witnessed,"  the statement said, "efforts by Mark Judge, Brett Kavanaugh and others to cause girls to become inebriated and disoriented so they could then be ‘gang raped’ in a side room or bedroom by a ‘train’ of numerous boys ... These boys included Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh ... In approximately 1982, I became the victim of one of these ‘gang’ or ‘train’ rapes where Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh were present,” she added.

Avenatti wrote also, "Here is a picture of my client Julie Swetnick. She is courageous, brave and honest. We ask that her privacy and that of her family be respected."

Kavanaugh responded by reiterating his denial of wrongdoing. In a rambling 80-minute press conference filled vague if not misleading comments, President Trump restated his support for Kavanaugh, his denunciations of Avenatti and left open the possibility that he might change his mind after hearing from Kavanaugh's accusers in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday.

Trump seemed unaware that Senate Republicans have not permitted Swetnick and another accuser, Deborah Ramirez, either to speak to the committee or to the FBI in a renewed investigation. Trump said also that his own experience in being accused of sexual misconduct had made him especially sympathetic to Kavanaugh.

Trump falsely stated that he has been accused of misconduct by four women. The number has been widely reported at more than a dozen and up to a score of women, even discounting those who have withdrawn complaints, including two women who allege that Trump raped them when they were 12 and 13.

Avenatti described the Republican majority's planned proceeding Thursday as a "farce." 

Avenatti continued in his Tweet, "Below is my correspondence to Mr. Davis of moments ago, together with a sworn declaration from my client. We demand an immediate FBI investigation into the allegations. Under no circumstances should Brett Kavanaugh be confirmed absent a full and complete investigation."

Separately on Wednesday night, NBC's Kasie Hunt said her colleagues were reporting that a fourth accuser, currently anonymous, has surfaced who alleges that her daughter saw Kavanaugh in 1998 physically attack a woman outside a bar in a sexual manner and in a way that created that created a traumatic memory for the observers.. MSNBC said that Kavanaugh has denied the incident to committee Republicans, who were reported to be investigating the matter in an unspecified manner.

Bigger Picture

Only one of the nominee's accusers will be permitted to talk and she will not be able to provide supportive witnesses and other evidence. This is much like Senate Judiciary Committee senators deprived Anita Hill in 1991 of most of the supportive witnesses willing to back her during the rushed 1991 hearings leading to the 52-48 confirmation of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court.

Republicans have already scheduled a committee vote for Friday because their leadership is desperate to install another highly partisan justice, like Thomas, to guide the courts further into their radical right activism by virtue of their court majority and their lifetime appointments.

One of Kavanaugh's special qualifications, it is reported, is that he has argued that presidents should now be immune in effect to criminal and civil litigation during their terms. That would be a special benefit to the man who nominated him, the legally vulnerable President Trump. It is also opportunistic reversal for Kavanaugh, who built his career in part by aggressively prosecuting President Bill Clinton as a member of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr's staff during their 1990s efforts to impeach the Democrat over perjury and obstruction charges arising from his consensual oral sex with the former intern Monica Lewinsky.

That has provoked a furious response by justice seekers, with reactions that include more than 200 arrests of spectators during the first week of confirmation hearings this week and such strong insults as the graphic at right distributed on social media. This editor has observed these demonstrations in covering the Kavanaugh hearings, where the Senate's unfairness far exceeds the disgraceful levels at the 1991 confirmation hearings for Thomas that I attended. 

Fortunately, litigator Michael Avenatti apparently plans to start implementing the first of these recommendations later today with announcement of the identity of a client who is accusing Kavanaugh of raping her.

This crime is part of what Avenatti called on Sept. 23 a pattern of preppy gang violence against women stemming from Kavanaugh’s younger years, including during the time that the nominee attended the Jesuit-run Georgetown Prep School in the Washington, DC suburb of Bethesda, Maryland.

The brilliance of the strategy is that Avenatti, shown at left, and his client apparently are taking their case directly to the American public, thereby underscoring the sham so-called search for truth at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing Thursday. Yet their strategy does not undercut the utility of the committee hearing for the rest of a truth-seekers’ agenda.

We'll describe below the four other parts of our recommended strategy. But before that we suggest a way for readers to keep up with the many important news stories on the topics central to the court nomination battle.

As we reported earlier this week, so many developments are occurring that our Justice Integrity Project is chronicling them on a daily basis on several sub-sites that are accessible by buttons on our home page or more directly through the links here:

• News Reports (Daily compilation of general news reports and commentaries relevant to justice and political matters)
• #MeToo News
• Media News
• SCOTUS Review (Supreme Court of the United States)
• Deep State (Propaganda, Assassination, Regime Change) News, Commentary)
• Trump Watch (Mueller Probe and other investigations)

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) screams at his longtime Democratic colleague Pat Leahy of Vermont during the Kavanaugh hearing, in which Leahy and other Democrats have accused the nominee of perjuring himself by denying use of stolen Democratic Senate documents (screenshot).

Breaking late Sunday were reports of at least two new sexual misconduct accusers against President Trump's Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, as well as new details suggesting several GOP propaganda plots to win his confirmation by deceptive and otherwise sinister methods.

The new allegations of misconduct come from Deborah Ramirez, a former Yale College contemporary of the nominee, as reported by The New Yorker magazine writers Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer. Separately, litigator Michael Avenatti wrote via Twitter that he will make public soon a blockbuster allegation by one or more other accusers, summarized here by the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, albeit with limited detail:

“We are aware of significant evidence of multiple house parties in the Washington, D.C., area during the 1980s” during which Kavanaugh and others “would participate in the targeting of women with alcohol/drugs in order to allow a ‘train’ of men to subsequently gang rape them,” Avenatti wrote.

Avenatti (shown in a portrait) said he would provide additional evidence in the coming days.

Kavanaugh, who has denied any wrongdoing, is shown below at left in a yearbook photo taken during his senior year at Georgetown Prep the same year he began studies at Yale. Critics of the nomination speculate that Republicans have known that more misconduct allegations were coming at him. So, they say, that is  why Senate Republicans fought so hard to prevent a renewed FBI investigation of his background and to hold any new hearing and vote on his nomination on a rushed schedule.

Update on Sept. 24 from the New York Times: Brett Kavanaugh, Facing New Allegations, Vows He Will Not Withdraw by Sheryl Gay Stolberg.

Also on Sunday, negotiators for the Senate Judiciary Committee Republican majority and Kavanaugh's first accuser, Dr. Christine Brasey Ford, reached an apparent agreement on the major outlines of her scheduled testimony against the nominee, who is currently a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia after a disputed confirmation in which Democrats accused him of perjury regarding emails stolen from Democratic Senate staffers.

The nominee and his accuser, who is a professor based in California, are now confirmed to speak Thursday of this week before the committee on the same day at separate times.

Meanwhile, several news outlets were reporting details and speculation about several alleged Republican public relations plots to defend Kavanaugh by planting false or misleading information in the media.

One of the most notable, albeit one so clumsy as to be derided later as "Keystone Cops," involved efforts to smear an innocent prep school classmate of Kavanaugh's with a false suggestion that it was the classmate, not Kavanaugh, who attempt to rape Brasey (the name she uses professionally).

Washington Post opinion columnist Kathleen Parker floated the concept of mistaken identity in a column on Sept. 18, Is there a Kavanaugh doppelganger?

Edward Whelan, president of a conservative think tank called the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a friend of Kavanaugh's, then heavily promoted the idea with the help of the well-connected Republican firm CRC Public Relations. Last week, they named one of Kavanaugh's prep school classmates as the likely suspect in attempting to rape Brasey.

Brasey on Friday thwarted that concept by writing that Whelan, a Harvard Law School graduate, was wrong to make the charge.

Whelan then retracted his claim, apologized and was put on leave of absence by his think tank's board for a month. But critics demanded answers on whether and how this campaign had been coordinated with Kavanaugh, the White House, the Washington Post's Parker and / or financial backers of the Kavanaugh appointment.

Among other important developments, President Trump's praised Kavanaugh on Sinclair Broadcasting Corp., as reported by Media Matters in Opinion: In an interview with Sinclair, Trump touts Kavanaugh’s “unblemished record” and says he thinks he will be confirmed.

Trump is shown at left with Sinclair host Boris Epshteyn, a former Trump staffer. Sinclair requires all its stations to carry Epshteyn's commentaries, which nearly always praise or otherwise defer to Trump and other Republicans. Sinclair owns more television stations by far than any other U.S. chain.

The now-chaotic nomination process has prompted revelations affecting all three branches of the federal government, plus the nation's mid-term elections in November and the news media, particularly credibility of specific outlets and their working relationships with sources.

Among many examples of conflict coming to light durign the Kavanaugh confirmation process is that CRC Public Relations loaned a staffer, Garrett Ventry, to the Senate Judiciary Committee's Republican majority to work on the Kavanaugh confirmation even though Ventry been fired from a previous job on a claim of sexual harassment. Ventry has denied wrongdoing but nonetheless resigned over the weekend.

Grassley, meanwhile, has been using his immense powers to thwart on behalf of Kavanaugh the normally routine release of a nominee's documents and an FBI investigation of any claims of wrongdoing that arise during the confirmation process.

As illustrated by the adjoining graphic by Fox News, Grassley, a longtime Republican senator from Iowa, has been working with his PR team to foster the image that he and Kavanaugh are the real victims of any delays caused by questions about the nominee. 

So many developments are occurring that our Justice Integrity Project is chronicling them on a daily basis is several sub-sites that are accessible by buttons on our home page or more directly through the links here:

• News Reports (Daily compilation of general news reports and commentaries relevant to justice and political matters)
• #MeToo
• Media
• SCOTUS Review (Supreme Court of the United States)
• Deep State (Propaganda, Assassination, Regime Change) News, Commentary)
• Trump Watch (Mueller Probe and other investigations)