Here’s the thing about the expanded witness interview list in the FBI investigation into Brett Kavanaugh
Tonight we’ve learned that the FBI investigation into Brett Kavanaugh has expanded to include interviews with at least six people. Because these things are only becoming public in the instances where the person being interviewed decides to announce it, we have no way of knowing if the number is six or fifty. But we now know that it’s no longer just the original four witnesses. That’s a big deal, because those were the only interviews that Kavanaugh felt safe about.
When the Trump White House originally told the FBI it could only interview a small list of people, it included Mark Judge and P.J. Smyth, but it excluded Tim Gaudette (“Timmy’s house”) and Chris “Squi” Garrett – even though they were all potential witnesses to the allegations made by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford. This list was obviously crafted with Brett Kavanaugh’s input. For whatever reason, Kavanaugh must have thought he’d be safe if the FBI only spoke to some of them and not others.
Was Kavanaugh betting that Judge and Smyth would take his side? Was he afraid that Gaudette and Garrett would testify about something ugly? We can’t know for sure what was in Kavanaugh’s head, but there had to have been a reason he signed off on two of these guys, and not the other two. Yet now that the probe has expanded, sure enough, the FBI has interviewed all four of them. Kavanaugh and his handlers were specifically trying to avoid this scenario.
Keep in mind that the FBI probe doesn’t have to be comprehensive enough to nail Brett Kavanaugh on a criminally indictable level. This isn’t about that, at least not at the moment. This is about the FBI exposing just enough dirt on Kavanaugh to make it impossible for the holdout Senators to vote for him. For whatever reason, Kavanaugh and his people were clearly afraid of the FBI interviewing Timmy and Squi – yet it just happened. And again, we don’t know how many other people the FBI may have interviewed who weren’t on the original list.
