Last week, The New York Times attempted to revive the smear campaign against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, pointing to a letter from the FBI to seven Democratic senators sent on June 30, 2021 discussing thousands of tips that had been sent in during Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
The 4,500 tips that came into the FBI tip line are being presented as new or “compelling,” even though they are anything but. Reuters reported on Thursday that “Seven Democratic Senators on Thursday said that newly released materials show the FBI failed to fully investigate sexual misconduct allegations against U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh when he was nominated to the court in 2018.”
“The senators, including Sheldon Whitehouse (RI) and Chris Coons (DE), said a letter they received from the FBI last month shows the agency gathered over 4,500 tips relating to Kavanaugh without any apparent further action by investigators,” Reuters added.
The Democrats had written in their letter to the FBI that “If the FBI was not authorized to or did not follow up on any of the tips that it received from the tip line, it is difficult to understand the point of having a tip line at all.”
The Times joined in on reviving the smear campaign, with reporter Kate Kelly editorializing, “The letter left uncertain whether the FBI itself followed up on the most compelling leads.”
As National Review’s John McCormack reported, the Times (and other media outlets) left out key details that would provide context showing the number of tips were frivolous.
“[T]he Times’ report leaves out three key details that would have helped both to clear the air and to clear Kavanaugh’s name: (1) The FBI’s supplemental investigation was always supposed to be limited in time and scope; (2) a summary of all the tips the FBI received was available to all 100 U.S. senators; and (3) we have good reason to believe that none of the supposedly ‘compelling leads’ were actually compelling at all,” McCormack wrote.
To the first point, McCormack wrote that a bipartisan agreement limited the FBI’s supplemental background investigation to one week and only “current” and “credible” allegations – specifically to keep it from becoming a fishing expedition, even though that is exactly what the entire episode was from the beginning.
As to the knowledge of the 4,500 tips somehow being new, McCormack reported that the information was available to senators back in 2018. A summary of all 4,500 tips was included in the FBI’s report and available to all 100 U.S. senators. This is nothing new.
Further, Mike Davis, chief counsel for nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee during Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, said the Democrats’ sudden outrage at the tip line information was odd.
“If there was anything that caught their attention, they could have flagged it for further investigation,” Davis told National Review.
“Every whack-job in the world called into that thing. That’s why there were 4,500 [tips],” Davis added. “Grassley’s team went through the entire tip-line. It was nonsense.”
A Republican senator told National Review that “There was nothing in there . . . nothing anywhere providing a shred of corroboration,” relating to an existing allegation or a new allegation.
Finally, McCormack reported, the Democrats’ reference to “compelling” or “relevant” tips were likely bunk.
“New York Times reporters Kate Kelly and Robin Pogrebin spent nearly a year investigating Kavanaugh for a book they published in September 2019. The only new allegation they reported was patently absurd: The two reporters hyped a new allegation that, while at Yale, Kavanaugh was allegedly standing around naked at a party when Kavanaugh’s ‘friends’ allegedly ‘pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.’ The alleged female victim in this incident had no recollection of it,’” McCormack reported.
In addition, the FBI interviews actually helped clear Kavanaugh, even if Democrats refuse to accept it. There was no corroborating information for his main accuser, Christine Blasey Ford’s claim that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her 30 years earlier when they were both in high school. Her own friends doubted her story. Leland Keyser, who Ford mentioned as someone who could corroborate her story, said she didn’t remember such a party of even meeting Kavanaugh back then. She told the FBI she didn’t “have any confidence” in Blasey Ford’s story.
Another allegation against Kavanaugh, during his time in college, also fell apart under scrutiny, as the accuser didn’t think Kavanaugh was the culprit until she spoke with Democrat attorneys. A third allegation came from a woman represented by Michael Avenatti.
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Source: Dailywire
