Chuck Grassley just made a huge mistake by asking the DOJ/FBI to investigate Michael Avenatti and Julie Swetnick
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley has decided that he and his GOP cohorts didn’t do enough damage when they rammed Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation through while protecting him from the numerous criminal accusations against him. Now Grassley has announced that he’s made criminal referrals to the DOJ against Kavanaugh accuser Julie Swetnick and her attorney Michael Avenatti. Not only is this corrupt and outrageous on Grassley’s part, it’s a huge screw-up.
Donald Trump and the GOP went out of their way to try to prevent the FBI from even so much as speaking to Julie Swetnick about Brett Kavanaugh. Whatever evidence and testimony she’s sitting on, it clearly spooked the hell out of Kavanaugh. But now, because Chuck Grassley just asked the DOJ (and by default the FBI) to criminally investigate Swetnick, suddenly we’re looking at a situation where the FBI will have to interview her about Kavanaugh. But it gets worse.
The Democrats have already stated that if they take control of the House, they’ll immediately launch a (real) investigation into Brett Kavanaugh. By putting things in motion now, Chuck Grassley is unwittingly helping to lay the groundwork for the Democrats to take Kavanaugh down. Grassley has consistently shown that he’s a small and petty man who is also very unintelligent. He’s seeking simplistic revenge by harassing his enemies with imaginary political charges that won’t stick, and he’s too dumb to understand what he’s putting in motion.
This also serves to put the Brett Kavanaugh debacle, and the Republican Party’s complicity in it, back into the national spotlight just twelve days before the election. If anyone on the left needed additional motivation to go vote, this certainly can’t hurt. Finally, it’s worth noting that Chuck Grassley is making a point of doing this just before the midterms, suggesting that he has at least some fear of the GOP losing control of the Senate, after which he would no longer have the power to make criminal referrals. In other words, go vote!
