Brett Kavanaugh screws up while denying attempted rape accusation
As the day goes on, the odds are sharply increasing that Brett Kavanaugh will have to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee about the attempted rape accusation that has been leveled against him by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. As such, he’s already begun trying to lay the groundwork for his defense. The trouble? He just screwed up.
Republican Senator Orrin Hatch says that he spoke to Brett Kavanaugh about the incident, and that Kavanaugh told him he wasn’t even at the party where he allegedly tried to rape Ford (source). Here’s the question: what party? Ford has not said precisely when or where the party took place. Yet Kavanaugh is preemptively insisting that, no matter when or where this party took place, he definitely knows he wasn’t there.
In so doing, Kavanaugh is basically claiming that, throughout his party-filled high school years, he was never at any party with Christine Blasey Ford. But how could he be familiar enough with her, to know that she was never at any of the parties he attended? They didn’t even go to the same high school. If Kavanaugh had said that he wasn’t aware of having ever been at any party with Ford, that would have been a realistic answer. But it’s absurd on its face for him to claim that he knows for sure that he never attended a party with her.
We’re left to wonder if Brett Kavanaugh, who hired a high powered trial attorney this morning, is trying to straddle the line between mounting a “court of public opinion” defense for his Supreme Court hearings, and a criminal defense in case he ends up on trial for this in a courtroom. He’s insisting that he wasn’t at the scene of the crime, which might help muddy the waters as far as reasonable doubt under the law. But by claiming that he wasn’t at any party with Ford, he just screwed up in the court of public opinion.
