“I’M GOING TO GET TO THE BOTTOM OF IT”
by Sharon Rondeau
(Sep. 30, 2018) — According to Sen. Lindsey Graham on “Sunday Morning Futures,” the FBI will be asking U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh’s high-school acquaintance, Mark Judge, if he knows anything about the allegations of Julie Swetnick, a third Kavanaugh accuser who voiced her claims on the eve of a public hearing by Kavanaugh’s first accuser, Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, and Kavanaugh this past Thursday to the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“The FBI…is going to ask Mark Judge have you ever seen Brett Kavanaugh drug women…the Avenatti claim, which Mark Judge was supposed to be an accomplice to,” [sic] Graham, a member of the committee, told host Maria Bartiromo. Graham said the FBI will also be speaking with second Kavanaugh accuser Deborah Ramirez, who claimed Kavanaugh committed sexual misconduct during a party while both were undergraduates at Yale. “Ms. Ramirez refuses to talk to the committee,” Graham added.
A client of outspoken Los Angeles attorney Michael Avenatti, Swetnick made the bizarre claim of having attended ten parties as a college student during the early 1980s wherein young women were allegedly drugged and abused, with Kavanaugh and Mark Judge in attendance.
Avenatti has made it clear that he strongly dislikes Donald Trump.
On Saturday, Ramirez’s attorney, John Clune, confirmed that the FBI had contacted her and demurred from making further comment. Many do not consider Ramirez’s claim credible given that The New York Times said it was provided the story, was unable to corroborate it and therefore declined to publish it.
Ramirez herself said that she was drunk at the time and could not be sure the perpetrator was Kavanaugh.
According to Avenatti, Swetnick is a former Justice Department and U.S. State Department employee with high-level security clearances. Research performed by the Associated Press reveals Swetnick as having been both a plaintiff and defendant in a number of lawsuits over the last 25 years.
Kavanaugh has denied all of the claims lodged against him, beginning with Ford’s, in which she said that Mark Judge was present and laughing with Kavanaugh when the latter allegedly sexually assaulted her at a gathering of unsupervised teenagers in 1982.
Judge said in a sworn statement that the event never happened.
Prior to Ford’s allegations becoming public earlier this month, Kavanaugh had never been accused of sexual misconduct, harassment, or misogyny. During the ordeal which has delayed a final confirmation vote, now entering its third week, Kavanaugh has received letters of support from more than five dozen women who knew him in high school and 18 others who clerked for him during his tenure on the U.S. District Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit beginning in 2006.
A number of press conferences and rallies have been held in support of his confirmation to the Supreme Court. Others opposed to his nomination protested during his public confirmation hearings on September 4-6.
Nominated on July 9 by President Donald Trump to replace the retiring Associate Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, Kavanaugh’s confirmation process included a rejection by virtually all Senate Democrats and numerous refusals to meet with him prior to the hearings.
In early August, Newsmax reported that more than 400 letters supporting his candidacy were received by the Judiciary Committee.
On Friday committee Republicans desired a quick confirmation vote to move the nomination to the full Senate, but a last-minute objection by Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ), who is retiring in January, resulted in the committee’s favorable vote with a request of the White House to direct the FBI to reopen its latest background check on Kavanaugh for a period of no more than one week.
On Twitter on Saturday evening, Avenatti was angry that within the scope of the FBI’s reopened probe, neither he nor his client had been contacted.
At approximately 12:45 PM EDT on Sunday, however, Avenatti appeared to acknowledge that the FBI will tangentially probe his client’s claims but objected to its lack of direct contact with Swetnick.
Kavanaugh has undergone six FBI background checks as a standard part of his vetting to work in the Justice Department, in the George W. Bush White House, and upon his nomination to the DC federal court in 2006.
None of the complaints were made public until the Judiciary Committee scheduled a vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination in mid-September, which was postponed twice to accommodate Ford’s providing testimony on Thursday.
On Sunday morning Graham told Bartiromo that he will be seeking a multi-pronged investigation into the leaker of Ford’s confidential letter sent to Rep. Anna Eshoo (D-CA18) and later, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), as well as Ford’s statement on Thursday that Feinstein’s office recommended to her the law firm of Katz, Marshall & Banks, LLP.
“I’m going to get to the bottom of it,” Graham said of that and the release to the press of Ford’s identity, which she specifically said she did not want.
Katz and Banks are both known for their Democrat activism, Graham said, and Katz has proclaimed herself part of “the Resistance” against Trump and his policies.
On Saturday, committee Chairman Charles Grassley wrote to the Justice Department and FBI with a criminal referral after a Rhode Island resident reportedly submitted a false claim about Kavanaugh.