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)

An analysis of the guilty plea Sept. 14 by the corrupt global strategist and former Trump 2016 campaign chairman Paul Manafort features five notable crime scenarios easy to overlook by busy readers or even reporters.

Paul Manafort admitted during his federal court plea deal too many crimes to mention here or in any other news commentary of reasonable length.

U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson told her courtroom in the nation’s capital that she had never previously heard such a long litany of crimes, which are reported here in a court filing.

This editor covered Manafort’s guilty pleas on Sept. 14 at the federal courthouse in Washington, DC and the defendant's trial last month at the federal courthouse across the Potomac River from the District in Alexandria, Virginia.

A Justice Integrity Project photo shows CNN’s Justice Department correspondent Evan Perez reporting on the Sept. 14 Manafort guilty plea

It's being widely reported that Manafort could now be sharing secrets deeply damaging to President Trump and his family on such topics as the 2016 Trump Tower strategy meeting with Donald Trump Jr. and Russian representatives and also the reasons why the Trump campaign made a pro-Russia change in the GOP campaign platform under Manafort's leadership at the Republican National Convention in 2016.

More generally, the public sees the remarkable number of high-level aides to Trump who have been indicted and convicted. These include Manafort's longtime aide Rick Gates. Gates was also the 2016 Deputy National Campaign chairman and a leader of the Trump Inaugural. Others indicted and convicted include former Director of National Intelligence Michael Flynn and Trump's longtime personal lawyer Michael Cohen.

Perhaps even more devastating to a Trump defense and other efforts to block an investigation are the massive documentation collected by Mueller's team and other federal and state prosecution allies.

These documents encompass White House and other federal records, nearly all of Cohen's professional records (possibly including tapes of conservations with Trump and others) and records kept by the Trump Organization's long-serving Chief Financial Officer Allen Weisselberg, shown at right, and likely including Trump's secret tax returns.

Yet there are other important aspects to Manafort's plea and forthcoming cooperation with prosecutors. Our picks as “notable news nuggets” are below, along with an appendix excerpting major news treatments published elsewhere.

• Hiring 'the Best': Manafort Is 'The Swamp'
• Manafort Admits To All Charges (Even those from the hung jury in Virginia)
• Guilt Includes $16 Million Fraudulent Loan From Would-be Army Secretary
• Mueller Probe Is Not a 'Witch-hunt' If Pro-Russian Party Paid Manafort To Hurt Hillary
• Forfeitures Now Meet or Exceed Mueller Probe's Cost

Looking Ahead:

• Forfeiture Precedent For United States To Seize Trump Assets Gained Via Crime?
• Real Reason Why Manafort Backed Mike Pence For Vice President