Before Senate face-off, new accusations leave Kavanaugh in jeopardy

On the eve of an extraordinary hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee at which both Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, a California professor who has accused him of assaulting her when they were both teenagers, will testify, Trump said that “some very evil” Democrats had plotted to destroy Kavanaugh’s reputation. And he lamented what he called “a very dangerous period in our country” in which men are presumed guilty.

But even as he described the charges against Kavanaugh as “false accusations,” Trump seemed for the first time to acknowledge the mounting challenges facing his nominee. Asked why he repeatedly sides with men over their female accusers, the president said hearing the stories from Blasey might change his mind.

“I’m going to see what happens tomorrow,” Trump said during an hourlong news conference in New York, where he was attending the United Nations General Assembly. “I’m going to be watching, you know, believe it or not. It’s possible they will be convincing.”

But the president admitted that his skepticism about Kavanaugh’s accusers is rooted in his own anger about having himself been the target of what he considers false accusations of sexual misconduct.

“So when I see it, I view it differently than someone sitting home watching television where they say, ‘Oh, Judge Kavanaugh this or that,'” Trump said in a rare moment of televised self-reflection. “It’s happened to me many times.”

At Thursday’s hearing, Kavanaugh will appear after Blasey and is expected to say in his opening statement that the allegations against him are “last-minute smears” and “grotesque and obvious character assassination,” according to testimony he released Wednesday.

Those denials include another accusation that surfaced this week, this one from a student at Yale when Kavanaugh was also there. The student, Deborah Ramirez, said in an interview with The New Yorker that he had exposed himself to her at a dormitory party. She has not been asked to testify by the Judiciary Committee.

Yet even as he prepared his defense, Kavanaugh and his allies found themselves fending off more charges of sexual misconduct from other women on Wednesday, with perhaps the most explosive accusations coming from a woman represented by Michael Avenatti, the firebrand lawyer who already represents Stephanie Clifford, the pornographic film actress who has said she had an affair with Trump.

A second new accusation was made in an anonymous letter sent to Sen. Cory Gardner, R-Colo., by a woman who said her daughter witnessed Kavanaugh drunkenly push her friend, a woman he was dating, up against a wall “very aggressively and sexually” after they left a bar one night in 1998.

Her daughter and other witnesses were “shocked,” she said. “Her friend, traumatized, called my daughter yesterday, September 21, 2018, wondering what to do about it,” the woman wrote. “They decided to remain anonymous.”

Staff lawyers for the Judiciary Committee have twice questioned Kavanaugh by phone about the accusations — on Sept. 17 and on Tuesday — to prepare him for the Thursday hearing. Late Wednesday, as they were preparing to grill him by phone a third time, the committee released transcripts of the earlier calls that revealed new charges under investigation and Kavanaugh’s at times heated denials.

“This is crazytown,” he said at one point.

In the call Wednesday night, Kavanaugh denied the new charges leveled by Avenatti's client, Julie Swetnick, who said that in the 1980s, she witnessed Kavanaugh and a friend, Mark Judge, try to get teenage girls “inebriated and disoriented so they could then be ‘gang raped.'”

Kavanaugh said he did not know Swetnick and called her claims “ridiculous and from the ‘Twilight Zone.'" Judge denied the accusations through a lawyer.

In another example of the frenzy surrounding Kavanaugh’s nomination, the transcripts showed that committee staff also questioned him about a constituent of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., who charged — and then recanted Wednesday night — that Kavanaugh had raped a woman on a boat in 1985 in Newport, Rhode Island.

In the interview with the committee, Kavanaugh fiercely said that the episode never took place.

Democrats seized on the latest accusations to call on Kavanaugh to withdraw, and they pummeled Republicans with requests for outside investigations of the accusations. Republicans, fuming over what they view is increasingly craven partisan attacks, vowed to push ahead with a committee vote scheduled for Friday.

But even before Thursday’s hearings, it was clear that Kavanaugh’s confirmation was in jeopardy. Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, a key swing vote, told colleagues in a private meeting that she was troubled by the latest accusations. Holding a printout of Swetnick’s declaration, she asked why the Judiciary Committee was not issuing a subpoena for Judge, who has appeared in two separate accusations, according to an official familiar with the meeting.

Collins joined two other Republican senators, Jeff Flake of Arizona and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, in expressing reservations about the Kavanaugh nomination, more than enough to sink it.

After days of blanket denials of any bad behavior, prepared remarks released by the committee showed that Kavanaugh would strike a note of contrition on Thursday even as he maintained his innocence on sexual assault. He planned to tell the Senate Judiciary Committee that he sometimes drank too much and “was not perfect” in high school.

“I drank beer with my friends, usually on weekends. Sometimes I had too many. In retrospect, I said and did things in high school that make me cringe now,” Kavanaugh planned to tell the committee, according to prepared remarks. “But that’s not why we are here today. What I’ve been accused of is far more serious than juvenile misbehavior.”

In her own prepared remarks, Blasey said she had wrestled for weeks with whether to come forward with a dark memory that had “haunted” her and that she knew would upend her life.

“I am here today not because I want to be. I am terrified,” she will tell senators, according to the prepared remarks. “I am here because I believe it is my civic duty to tell you what happened to me while Brett Kavanaugh and I were in high school.”

Taking direct aim at a central piece of the defense by Kavanaugh and Republican allies who have asserted that she must be misremembering the identity of her assailant, Blasey will say that their friend groups had “intersected” during her freshman and sophomore years of high school and that they attended parties together.

“We did not know each other well, but I knew him and he knew me,” she plans to say.

Other, potentially consequential disclosures relating to Blasey’s claims were quickly overshadowed in a day of continuing developments. They included the release by the Judiciary Committee of handwritten calendar notations from Kavanaugh’s high school days as well as affidavits from Blasey’s friends and husband and a copy of the polygraph test administered in August at the advice of her lawyers. The test indicated no deception.

Allies of Blasey and Kavanaugh assembled letters attesting to their integrity. Protesters prepared for rallies. And shadowy threats flooded the phone lines and inboxes of nearly every key player in the drama.

On the Senate floor, Flake delivered a fiery speech chastising both parties for judging the women’s claims — and Trump for dismissing Blasey altogether because she did not report a sexual assault when she was a teenager.

“How uninformed and uncaring do we have to be to say things like that, much less to believe them?” Flake said of the president he has often condemned. “Do we have any idea what kind of message that sends, especially to young women?”

At the same time, lawyers for Blasey gave the committee four affidavits — one from Blasey’s husband and three from friends — stating that she had told them in recent years that Kavanaugh had assaulted her in high school.

Neither the calendar nor the affidavits prove or disprove the cases that Blasey or Kavanaugh have sought to advance, but Democratic senators are likely to use the calendar to question how truthful Kavanaugh has been about his younger days. And although the affidavits suggest that Blasey’s story has been consistent, Republicans are more likely to focus on the lack of contemporaneous evidence that could corroborate her story.

Kavanaugh intended to use the calendar, a green 1982 Northwestern Mutual Audubon wall calendar, as a part of his defense that he did not assault Blasey nor had any memory or record of a party like the one she described. No such entry exists to note a gathering that summer that exactly corresponds with Blasey’s recollection.

But the calendar pages from May, June, July and August do contain notations that could be seen as helpful to her. He did “go to Judge’s,” an apparent reference to Judge, the friend of Kavanaugh’s whom Blasey identified as participating in the assault. On July 1, 1982, he was to go to a friend’s house for “skis” with Judge and “P.J.” — possibly “brewskis” with Patrick J. Smyth, a classmate of Kavanaugh’s at Georgetown Preparatory School, identified by Blasey as P.J., another student attending the gathering where she says she was assaulted.

Blasey has said she did not tell anyone about the assault at the time out of fear that she might get in trouble. But the affidavits, all signed this week, suggest that Blasey had told some of the people closest to her, including her husband, about the episode at various points in recent years.

Russell Ford, Blasey’s husband, said his wife shared the details of the assault in a 2012 couple’s therapy session.

“She said that she had been trapped in a room and physically restrained by one boy who was molesting her while the other boy watched,” he said.

The details are consistent with the account that Blasey shared with a Democratic senator this summer and The Washington Post this month. Ford said that his wife mentioned Kavanaugh’s name again in 2017, when Trump announced Justice Neil M. Gorsuch would be his nominee for the court.

Blasey has said that her therapist took notes during the session, but her lawyers said on Wednesday that they did not plan to release her medical records because of privacy concerns.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Before Senate face-off, new accusations leave Kavanaugh in jeopardy

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