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Report: Kavanaugh won’t commit to recusal from Trump/Mueller related matters

RJKarl said:
Except Ford has said she knows the other guy well and even visited him in the hospital. She said there is zero chance it was him.

What this does show is how much of a scumball Kavanaugh is in letting his people slime a totally innocent person.
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How the fuck does she know? She was blind drunk.

Wait until you find out the whole deal is riddled with holes and patched with Bullshit

The smart guys out here who have actually been out in the world don’t believe any of this political stunt.
 
Furthermore, Ford is demanding that no lawyers be allowed to question her. So, examination or cross examination.

Ford also wants Kavanaugh to testify first (?) I’m not sure what she is aiming at here but the accuser,for obvious reasons,stands ahead of the accused
 
Why We Need an F.B.I. Investigation: A hearing without evidence would be little more than theater.


Without the context that the findings of an F.B.I. investigation could provide, the Senate hearing planned for Monday pitting Brett Kavanaugh against Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused him of sexual assault, runs the risk of being seen as little more than Kabuki theater, or, more pointedly, a gesture of appeasement to the #MeToo movement.

In other words, we gave her a hearing, now we’re ready to vote.

With no other witnesses or evidence, we’ll end up with a high-status, high-profile male judge squaring off against an unknown female research psychologist from Northern California. This “he said, she said” standoff is unlikely to change any minds and might merely reinforce the preconceptions of the senators who will vote on Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to the United States Supreme Court. And we know how that is likely to turn out.

This is why we need context. To suggest that the F.B.I. doesn’t do these sorts of investigations, as President Trump did, is simply false. The F.B.I. is responsible for doing background investigations of judicial candidates. I know; I went through one after President Bill Clinton nominated me for a federal judgeship in Massachusetts.

The investigation begins with an application that could not be more intrusive. You’re asked to list the name of everyone you ever lived with, every address you ever inhabited, every detail of your finances. Did you ever experiment with illegal drugs and, if so which and when? If you had, your nomination might be nixed, depending on the drug. It didn’t matter if you had “experimented” in college and were now in your 50s. It didn’t matter if you had led an otherwise exemplary life in the intervening 30 years.

To put the F.B.I. back to work on Judge Kavanaugh, all the president has to do is ask. There is precedent for such a request. In 1991, when Anita Hill accused Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment after his nomination to the Supreme Court, President George H.W. Bush ordered an F.B.I. investigation that was completed before the hearings began. At the time, Sen. Orrin Hatch, a Utah Republican who was a member of the Judiciary Committee then and now, called it “the very right thing to do, it was the appropriate thing to do,” and, he added, “it was a good investigation.”

This time, the Republicans on the committee, including Sen. Hatch, apparently think another look by the F.B.I. is unnecessary. The chairman of the committee, Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican, said in a statement that: “Dr. Ford’s testimony would reflect her personal knowledge and memory of events. Nothing the F.B.I. or any other investigator does would have any bearing on what Dr. Ford tells the committee, so there is no reason for any further delay.”

But that’s simply not the case. Yes, the F.B.I. did look into Judge Kavanaugh’s background before this accusation was made, though we don’t know whether behavior of this sort was explored. But now, this new information bears examining by the agency, just as Ms. Hill’s complaints of sexual harassment did.

Witnesses in a court proceeding rarely just “appear” without exchanging documents in discovery, without depositions or private investigations. The only setting that comes to mind in which this is not the rule is Judge Judy’s TV “courtroom.” Indeed, an F.B.I. investigation could be especially important for Judge Kavanaugh’s supporters on the committee. They are obliged to challenge Dr. Blasey’s credibility. To do so without facts, with only the usual tropes about what women do or don’t do, comes with extraordinary political risks.

What would such an investigation entail? The F.B.I. could investigate the facts surrounding the accusation itself. And there are facts. Was there a party? Where? Who was there? What do the attendees recall about that night? Did anyone see or hear anything that bears on the accusation? Did Dr. Blasey tell anyone what happened in the hours or days afterward? Did Judge Kavanaugh? The F.B.I.’s goal would be to corroborate what can be corroborated and refute what can be refuted.

What evidence is there, if any, of Dr. Blasey’s motives in bringing these accusations? For her, coming forward with this accusation is itself extraordinary, exposing her to the opprobrium of Judge Kavanaugh’s supporters. Is her story plausible? In the abstract, the claim is certainly credible — a boozy party, a young woman in the wrong place at the wrong time bumps into two drunk young men as she makes her way to the bathroom. The other man in the room, Mark Judge, a friend of Judge Kavanaugh’s at the time, has said doesn’t recall the night, though through his writing, he has lent credence to the sort of atmospherics that surround the accusation. His memoir, “Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk,” recalls his blackout drinking as a teenage alcoholic in those years.

What about the timing of Professor Blasey’s accusations? Was this a recent contrivance? Is she is now misremembering? The #MeToo movement has made clear why some women did not come forward about sexual assault. Women’s accusations were dismissed; the culture legitimized a “boys will be boys” atmosphere. There seemed to be nowhere to turn, whether it was the police or school officials.

Was it unreasonable for Dr. Blasey to remain silent during the several years that Mr. Kavanaugh’s 2003 nomination to the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit was stalled in Congress? How much did she know about the progress of his career? The fact that she related her accusation to her husband and her therapist in 2012, long before Judge Kavanaugh was in the news as a Supreme Court nominee, counts for her credibility, but the Senate needs to know, in detail, what she said to them.

Judge Kavanaugh has denied the accusation, vehemently. And it is significant that no other accusers have stepped forward. Many of the #MeToo accusations have involved “he said, she said, she said, she said.” In this case, dozens of women apparently have vouched for his character. The F.B.I. should interview them. For instance, they might ask whether he ever talked about his sexual exploits to peers at the time? What else can the F.B.I. find out about the judge that bears on his credibility? Democrats have claimed he misrepresented his work while he was in the George W. Bush White House in his testimony before the Judiciary Committee. Or, significantly, what other information did earlier background checks turn up about the judge that the F.B.I. did not pursue?

An appointment to the Supreme Court is not an entitlement. The background investigation I underwent for a District Court judgeship was probing. Shouldn’t the inquiry for a potential Supreme Court justice be more so? After all, this a position of life tenure that demands moral leadership as the court shapes American law for what is likely to be decades to come.

It is in everyone’s interest that this nomination not proceed under a cloud.
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How Strong Does the Evidence Against Kavanaugh Need to Be?: Even if it wouldn’t support a criminal conviction or civil liability, a merely credible allegation is enough to disqualify him.

The allegation made by Christine Blasey Ford — that at age 15 she was the victim of a sexual assault by a 17-year-old Brett Kavanaugh — has not only upended Judge Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, but has also left Americans wondering what standards should apply to an accusation like this.

It’s natural to place this sort of accusation within a criminal-justice framework: the burden of proof beyond a reasonable doubt; the presumption of innocence; the right to confront and respond to an accuser. If Judge Kavanaugh stood criminally accused of attempted rape, all of that would apply with full force. But those concepts are a poor fit for Supreme Court confirmation hearings, where there’s no presumption of confirmation, and there’s certainly no burden that facts be established beyond a reasonable doubt.

What matters here isn’t law as much as politics — though not (or not just) partisan politics. Confirmation hearings are also about constitutional politics — the debate, involving both institutions of government and the polity, about what the Constitution means and requires.

So what standard should the Senate use in evaluating the claims made by Dr. Blasey and in deciding how they bear on Judge Kavanaugh’s fitness for a seat on the Supreme Court? The Senate’s approach to its constitutional “advice and consent” obligation has always depended on context. A number of factors matter: the timing of the vacancy; the justice being replaced; the nominee’s likely impact on the ideological makeup of the court; even the popularity of the president (very popular presidents have always had more leeway when it comes to picking justices). Then, of course, there’s the nominee.

Nominations have failed — that is, been withdrawn or voted down — for various reasons. Sometimes it’s because a majority of the Senate rejects a nominee’s vision of the Constitution and the role of the court. That was the case with Judge Robert Bork, a Reagan nominee whose skepticism about the Constitution’s protection of privacy and liberty convinced a majority of senators that he was simply too far right of the mainstream to be confirmed.

Other nominations have been unsuccessful because of private conduct. Another Reagan nominee, Judge Douglas Ginsburg, withdrew from consideration after the press uncovered reports of marijuana use that the F.B.I. had failed to unearth. And the Senate blocked President Lyndon Johnson’s attempt to elevate Abe Fortas to chief justice after evidence emerged that as a sitting member of the court, Justice Fortas had also been serving as a de facto adviser to the president, and after questions were raised about the propriety of outside payments he had received while on the court.

These allegations weren’t tested with the rigor that would have attached to judicial proceedings; neither evidence nor testimony (where it was given — Judge Ginsburg withdrew before testifying) was subject to the sort of adversarial testing that would occur in a court of law. But in each case, a constellation of considerations, both political and constitutional, operated to defeat nominations of individuals who were certainly qualified, by conventional metrics, to sit on the Supreme Court.

This context-dependent approach arguably leads to the conclusion that the existence of credible allegations against Judge Kavanaugh should be disqualifying, especially if further corroborating evidence emerges. That’s true even if the evidence wouldn’t support a criminal conviction or even civil liability.

Judge Kavanaugh has been nominated to fill a pivotal seat on the court. For many people, what’s at stake in this nomination isn’t just abortion and contraception rights, but also women’s ability to participate meaningfully (to paraphrase the Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey) in the economic and political life of the nation. So if members of the Senate conclude that a credible accusation of sexual misconduct has been made against Judge Kavanaugh, that should be enough to disqualify him from a seat that might allow him to cast the deciding vote on matters of women’s liberty and equality. Beyond these issues, the court is balanced on a knife edge on a range of questions that will affect everyone in the country, regardless of sex.

In this way, the accusations against Judge Kavanaugh are directly connected to his ability to perform the job — to rule in ways that members of the public trust and accept as legitimate, whether or not they agree with him. In 2018, more than half of Americans approved of the Supreme Court. In an era of meager faith in public institutions (Congress’s approval ratings hover around 17 percent), the relative trust in the court is a striking and important fact. But even more than a heartening fact, it’s critical to the court’s functioning: The public’s perception of the court as legitimate is in many ways the source of its power.

Putting Judge Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court in light of credible allegations against him could raise troublesome questions about the court’s legitimacy. And that’s a genuine problem, both for the court’s ability to function and more broadly for the rule of law.
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Uhhhh I did not realize Whelan is close to Kavanaugh and has been helping him throughout the confirmation process.

This is very damning.

 
The Case for Impeaching Kavanaugh

Charles Grassley, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, seem determined to call a vote next week on the confirmation of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court, even in the face of this week’s sexual assault allegations against him.

Senate Republicans assume, correctly, that if they can hold the party line, his installation on the Supreme Court is a sure thing. This is certainly true — even if the Democratic caucus in the Senate holds firm against Mr. Kavanaugh, they simply lack the votes to block him. But the Republicans’ calculus contains a significant error — namely, the assumption that if Mr. Kavanaugh is confirmed to the Supreme Court, that’s the end of the discussion of whether he is fit to serve.

The Constitution does provide that federal judges, including Supreme Court justices, “shall hold their Offices during good Behavior.” The settled understanding of this phrase is that so-called Article III judges enjoy lifetime tenure. But the Constitution also makes both judicial and executive officers subject to impeachment. And, as it happens, the House of Representatives holds “the sole Power of Impeachment.” If the Democrats win back the House in November, they can exercise that power.

Impeachment proceedings in the House are investigative in nature and come with a full panoply of quasi-judicial powers, including aids to investigations, such as the power to subpoena witnesses to compel them to appear and testify (subject, of course, to constitutional privileges, if applicable, such as the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee against self-incrimination).

If a simple majority of the House decided to proceed with impeachment, the House Judiciary Committee would be empowered to conduct a thorough and careful investigation of the sexual misconduct allegations that Professor Christine Blasey Ford has made against Mr. Kavanaugh involving a drunken sexual assault when both were high school students in suburban Washington, D.C.

Nor should the Democrats wait to formally take control of the House in January. The House Democratic leadership should pledge now that if they win a majority, they will conduct an impeachment investigation, to get to the truth. Doing so today would make clear to the Senate Republicans that if they rush to judgment, in the absence of a full and fair investigation, there will still be an investigation.

To be sure, the impeachment of a Supreme Court justice is a rare thing in our democracy. The last member of the Supreme Court to face a credible threat of impeachment was Associate Justice Abe Fortas, whom President Lyndon Johnson had nominated to replace Earl Warren as chief justice. Credible allegations of financial misconduct involving a lifetime paid consultancy with the Wolfson Foundation were made against Justice Fortas — Wolfson was facing federal criminal charges that could easily have found their way to the Supreme Court.

Under withering bipartisan criticism, Justice Fortas withdrew his nomination, and ultimately resigned from the Supreme Court. Had he not resigned, however, there’s a good chance he would have been impeached. (The only justice to be impeached was Samuel Chase, who was accused in 1804 of allowing his partisan views to affect his decisions, but the effort to oust him failed in the Senate.)

Of course, even if the House impeached Mr. Kavanaugh, it would still take a two-thirds majority in the Senate to convict and remove him from the Court. But the Senate vote would surely have at least something to do with the merits of the House’s case: If a full and fair investigation shows that Mr. Kavanaugh has lied regarding the incident — he has denied it categorically and says nothing even remotely like it ever occurred — Republican senators may find it hard to vote “no” in the #metoo era. It would be a terrible blow to the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, of course, but this is the risk that Senators McConnell and Grassley seem willing to take.

Moreover, an impeachment investigation could also encompass allegations that Mr. Kavanaugh has committed perjury before the Senate, twice, related to his work on the nomination of District Judge Charles Pickering to be a judge on the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. Under oath, both in 2006 and in 2018, he said he had no involvement with the White House strategy sessions associated with Judge Pickering’s nominations. Subsequently released emails, involving these sessions, suggest that these answers were at best misleading and at worst totally false.

Attending a strategy session as a White House staffer is not a crime. Lying under oath to the Senate Judiciary Committee, on the other hand, is. Perjury would be a perfectly justifiable, and constitutional, basis for impeachment.

An important caveat: Congress must take care to maintain the constitutional convention that has existed since the failed impeachment of Justice Chase. Federal judges, including members of the Supreme Court, should not be impeached based on their judicial rulings or philosophy. Accordingly, if the House were to initiate impeachment proceedings against Justice Kavanaugh in 2019, such proceedings should be strictly limited to questions associated with his alleged intentional and deliberate efforts to mislead the Senate about his character and fitness to serve.

We do not know the truth of the troubling allegations against Judge Kavanaugh. But, before someone is confirmed to the Supreme Court, good faith efforts to discover the truth should be made. And if the Senate won’t conduct a credible investigation now, the House should offer its assistance next year.

——-
Ronald A. Krotoszynski Jr. is a professor at the University of Alabama School of Law.
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Newenglanddeac said:
Uhhhh I did not realize Whelan is close to Kavanaugh and has been helping him throughout the confirmation process.

This is very damning.

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Newenglanddeac said:
Uhhhh I did not realize Whelan is close to Kavanaugh and has been helping him throughout the confirmation process.

This is very damning.

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No it isn’t you shill. Clinton lawyer repping for Ford as a part of the payback for Billy’s Special Counsel is what is damning. First the Soft Coup of a duly elected President and now more of the same Kabuki theater BS
 
Reasons for moving past this politicized stunt involving a rabid anti-Trump-hummus-gargling-harpie from that hot bed of unhinged behaviour, Cal Berkeley:

She Has Zero Evidence. Squat. NADA

Grassley’s Letter to Dems is logic of a high order.

So get off your Organic Ass, Balsy Ford, and testify as everyone else has to
 
Lectro said:
No it isn’t you shill. Clinton lawyer repping for Ford as a part of the payback for Billy’s Special Counsel is what is damning. First the Soft Coup of a duly elected President and now more of the same Kabuki theater BS
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This post has literally nothing to do with Whelan’s relationship to Kavanaugh.

Try again Kabuki theater chodemaster.
 
I don’t follow your twitter pastings.

Their all opinion BS hit pieces.

The thread is about Muellers “investigation” and how it came to be.

Release the documents so we can see for ourselves.

Rosenstein, stop stonewalling just because you are implicated you rat faced son of a bitch.
 
Lectro is the loudest voice of the GOP on here. He really uses a lot of violent sexual language in his posts.
 
Lectro said:
I don’t follow your twitter pastings.

Their all opinion BS hit pieces.

The thread is about Muellers “investigation” and how it came to be.

Release the documents so we can see for ourselves.

Rosenstein, stop stonewalling just because you are implicated you rat faced son of a bitch.
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Wrong thread funny man.
 
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