OPINION:
Two reporters for The New York Times penned a piece for their newspaper about their upcoming book on the Supreme Court’s Brett Kavanaugh, and in it they excerpted a section about the justice that includes statements from a former Yale classmate who allegedly saw him “with his pants down” at a college party. And that was all campaigning Democrats needed.
Away they went; impeachment, they cried.
Then came Hollywood.
“He MUST be impeached,” screamed actress Debra Messing, from Twitter.
How predictable.
But now, come to find out, whoops, oops, turns out this guy cited in The New York Times, this guy cited in the book making the claim against Kavanaugh, was, drumroll please, a real defender of the Clintons. On top of that, the authors-slash-reporters acknowledge that their entire arguments and allegations against Kavanaugh were formed by “gut reaction” to the past accusations that flew fast and furious during his confirmation hearings — and not from fact.
What an utter hit job. What a complete smear campaign.
President Donald Trump is right: Kavanaugh, indeed “should start suing people for libel, or the Justice Department should come to his rescue,” as he tweeted.
This is how the Takedown of Kavanaugh, Part Two, commenced. Robin Rogrebin and Kate Kelly, a couple of reporters at The New York Times, wrote the book, “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation.” In it, they go back in time to the 2018 confirmation hearing of Kavanaugh when a woman, Deborah Ramirez, accused him of exposing himself to her at a party during his freshman year at Yale University. Ramirez’s claims were unsubstantiated; Kavanaugh outright denied them. Enter Kelly and Rogrebin. With their “gut” instincts.
In their book, and in their piece in The New York Times, they say a classmate, Max Stier, “saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.”
From that, several of the Democrat Party’s top contenders for the White House — Kamala Harris, Bernie Sander, Cory Booker, Elizabeth Warren, Beto O’Rourke and Julian Castro — called for Kavanaugh’s impeachment.
“[He] must be impeached,” they all agreed.
But then came this teeny, weeny, itty, bitty update from The New York Times: A little revision made late Sunday evening — after all the trashing calls for impeachment of Kavanaugh came — that said several friends of this supposed Ramirez victim said she actually admitted she didn’t remember the alleged sexual assault.
How convenient.
The piece in The New York Times also forgot to mention this teeny, weeny, itty, bitty piece of information, as well — that Stier served as a defense attorney for Bill Clinton. Instead, he’s described as a “respected thought leader.”
Once again, how convenient.
This is what’s going on here: Democrats haven’t been able to impeach Trump.
Democrats weren’t able to prevent the seating of one of Trump’s Supreme Court picks, the highly esteemed — and properly constitutionally compassed — Kavanaugh.
So they’re using their backup plan, the smear campaign.
It’s despicable. It’s detestable. It’s a grotesque media-Democrat strategic takedown attempt of one of the legal world’s finest minds.
And it’s classic textbook libel. America’s political and media worlds should not be allowed to operate this way. If Kavanaugh doesn’t fight back, the Democrats, the media, the left-leaning operatives in this country — the shameless left-leaning operatives — will only be emboldened to go after the next guy, the next gal, with even more firepower.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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