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.