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)