OPINION:
Senate Judiciary Committee Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein, California Democrat, needs to answer some basic questions.
Were it not for her string of ridiculous decisions, the current firestorm would never have started.
Palo Alto University psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford has rocked the Supreme Court nomination of Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh with her explosive sexual assault accusation against him.
According to her interview with The Washington Post, she claims Judge Kavanaugh “pushed her into a bedroom along with his former classmate Mark Judge and attempted to remove her clothes. She also alleges that Kavanaugh put her hand over her mouth when she attempted to scream.” Judge Kavanaugh and Mr. Judge have denied the allegation. Judge Kavanaugh offered to testify under oath before he was asked to do so and denies he ever even attended the party she describes.
It should be noted that the accuser does not know precisely when or precisely where this took place, only that it happened in the “early 1980s.”
How do you disprove an accusation when you do not know when or where it supposedly happened?
Ms. Ford wrote the private letter in July to Ms. Feinstein, facilitated by Rep. Anna Eshoo, California Democrat. She required that the letter be kept confidential. She then reportedly took a polygraph in August, even though polygraphs are notoriously unreliable and inadmissible in court.
Confidentiality for the victims of sexual abuse should be inviolable. It should be up to the victims as to how public they decide to be.
In this case, we know that Ms. Feinstein dropped a bombshell several weeks ago when she revealed that she forwarded a letter with a serious allegation against Judge Kavanaugh to the FBI.
That information alone led to Ms. Ford’s identity being leaked within hours. That was Ms. Feinstein’s goal.
Long before this, the substance of Ms. Ford’s letter, with her name redacted, was presented to all Senate Judiciary Committee members, along with the results of the FBI background check conducted on Judge Kavanaugh. He passed that background check and this was the sixth FBI background check he has passed in his career. So the allegations were known to committee members and their staffs for some time.
Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley, Iowa Republican, has said that he does not believe Ms. Feinstein leaked the letter.
It is plausible to believe she would leak it for political reasons, since her rabid liberal base in California wants to stop President Trump at all costs and she is being credibly challenged from the left by California Senate Majority Leader Kevin de Leon.
However, after witnessing the ridiculous antics of several Democratic Senators during the confirmation hearings, it seems equally plausible that Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey, Sen. Kamala Harris of California, or someone else may have leaked the story.
Whether Ms. Feinstein ultimately leaked the details of the letter is not that important.
The public and the media did not know about the letter’s existence until Ms. Feinstein revealed its existence. She caused all of this. She needs to explain why she did that.
While she’s at it, she needs to explain why she did not raise the abuse allegation to Judge Kavanaugh when they met one-on-one, nor in the public or private sessions of the confirmation hearings. Those were the appropriate times to raise this issue directly.
Now Democrats are grasping at straws. Their singular goal is to attempt to delay Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation until after the midterm election, with the unlikely hope that they will take the Senate majority back and can block Trump’s Supreme Court nominations.
Delay is the goal. Defeat is impossible.
In the process, the Democrats are attempting to destroy a good man, a father of two girls, a husband and an influential judge of 12 years on the second highest court in the land, who has never had another accusation like this ever made against him. In fact, 65 women who knew Judge Kavanaugh in college wrote a letter in support of him after the accusation surfaced, including his girlfriend at the time of the alleged incident.
Brett M. Kavanaugh will be confirmed next week.
This charade is almost over.
Democrats, especially Dianne Feinstein, should be ashamed of themselves. What happened to “country before party”?
• Matt Mackowiak is president of Austin, Texas, and Washington, D.C.-based Potomac Strategy Group. He’s a Republican consultant, a Bush administration and Bush-Cheney re-election campaign veteran and former press secretary to two U.S. senators. His “Mack on Politics” podcast is available on iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher and on WashingtonTimes.com.
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