The Kavanaugh “investigation” was a political op by Trump and the FBI
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It’s long been evident that the FBI’s alleged investigation into Brett Kavanaugh was kayfabe, but Sheldon Whitehouse’s actual investigation has shown that Trump was the conductor:
The FBI was tasked with investigating the allegations against Kavanaugh. The idea, or so we were told, was that the bureau would be competent and impartial: that they would get to the bottom of this. Tips poured into the FBI hotline. There were multiple allegations against Kavanaugh, and witnesses to his alleged misconduct with women – a seemingly unending number of former college classmates who had seen a drunken Kavanaugh pull his penis out at Yale and shove it into a freshman’s face, for instance – were calling in with what they felt was urgent information about the judge’s character. They depicted him as a boorish, drunken, groping misogynist, a man without dignity or self-awareness, who was patently unfit for the office to which he had been nominated. Their mistake, maybe, was in thinking that it would matter. The FBI wrapped up their “investigation” within a week. They never even interviewed Blasey Ford.
On Tuesday, the office of Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island senator, released a report confirming what many of us who observed this fracas at the time already knew: there was no real investigation into Kavanaugh’s conduct. Instead, the FBI allowed itself to be used as a prop in a bit of political theater, orchestrated by the Trump administration, which was designed not to uncover the truth of the sexual violence allegations against Kavanaugh, but to bury it.
Several of the senators who went on to vote to confirm Kavanaugh cited the FBI investigation as their justification for doing so: after all, the bureau had not found any corroborating evidence. The truth is more that the bureau was not allowed to look for such evidence. The Trump White House, the report found, “exerted total control over the scope of the investigation, preventing the FBI from interviewing relevant witnesses and following up on tips. The White House refused to authorize basic investigatory steps that might have uncovered information corroborating the allegations.”
Thousands of tips came through the FBI’s tip line, many of them corroborating the detailed, credible testimony that Ford and Ramirez had already given. The White House threw these tips away. “On instructions from the White House, the FBI did not investigate thousands of tips that came in through the FBI’s tip line,” the Whitehouse report reads. “Instead, all tips related to Kavanaugh were forwarded to the White House without investigation. If anything, the White House may have used the tip line to steer FBI investigators away from derogatory or damaging information.”
It is worth stating plainly what the Whitehouse report alleges: that the president, with the full support of his staff, used the authority of his office to cover up multiple sexual assaults, on behalf of a man whose career they wanted to advance because they believed, correctly, that he would help them take abortion rights away. It would have been grisly enough if Trump had merely continued to support Kavanaugh in spite of the allegations. But that is not what he did. He actively helped to suppress the truth about him.
Somewhere in Bangor Susan Collins’s brow just furrowed three times.