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Trump White House Limited 'Sham' FBI Kavanaugh Probe, Senate Report Confirms
"The Trump White House exercised total control over the scope of the investigation, preventing the FBI from interviewing relevant witnesses and following up on tips," reads a new report.
Oct 08, 2024
"Our suspicions are confirmed," said one veteran women's rights advocate on Tuesday after a U.S. Senate report was released on former Republican President Donald Trump's suppression of a federal probe into Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) released a report after an investigation that he said took six years to complete due to a lack of access to Federal Bureau of Investigation correspondence and officials, but that ultimately revealed the Trump White House "exercised total control over the scope" of the FBI's investigation into allegations that Kavanaugh had committed sexual assault.
The report was released as U.S. voters in some states have already begun heading to the polls to vote in the 2024 election, in which Trump is running for a second term.
Whitehouse launched his investigation in 2018 after Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court—a major victory for the far right as it sought to gut federal abortion rights, which the justices did in 2022. Kavanaugh's confirmation followed allegations of sexual assault made by Christine Blasey Ford, who testified at an explosive hearing, and Deborah Ramirez, a Yale classmate of the judge.
A supplemental background investigation into Blasey Ford's allegations was begun by the FBI in response to the allegations, but the probe failed to uncover corroborating evidence for Blasey Ford's claims—a fact that several senators cited when explaining why they voted to confirm Kavanaugh despite the accusations against him.
Whitehouse's report found that the supplemental background investigation was "flawed and incomplete"—criticisms that were shared by Democratic senators and rights advocates at the time—and furthermore, that Trump's claim that the FBI would have "free rein" over the probe was a "sham."
"The Trump White House exercised total control over the scope of the investigation, preventing the FBI from interviewing relevant witnesses and following up on tips. The White House refused to authorize basic investigatory steps that might have uncovered information corroborating the allegations," reads the report, titled Unworthy of Reliance.
The report confirms that the FBI received more than 4,500 calls and electronic messages about Kavanaugh, but on instructions from the White House, officials forwarded the tips to the Trump administration "without investigation."
"If anything, the White House may have used the tip line to steer FBI investigators away from derogatory or damaging information," said Whitehouse.
The report found that the FBI interviewed only 10 people before concluding the supplemental background investigation on October 4, 2018, two days before Kavanaugh was confirmed by an historically narrow margin.
The people interviewed by the FBI had "firsthand knowledge of the allegations," but agents did not speak to "the witnesses potentially with the most firsthand knowledge"—Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh.
"Sometimes having what you know confirmed doesn't make it better," said Ilyse Hogue, former president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, now called Reproductive Freedom for All. Hogue and other reproductive justice advocates sounded the alarm in 2018 that the FBI's probe was "a total joke" that "disregarded women."
With the Trump administration circumscribing the FBI investigation and prohibiting officials from following up on leads, said Whitehouse, "senators cast their vote on the confirmation of a Supreme Court nominee credibly accused of sexual assault by multiple women on the basis of a truncated and incomplete investigation about whose scope the senators had been misled."
Debra Katz, a lawyer for Blasey Ford, applauded Whitehouse's probe and called for the Office of the Inspector General at the FBI to investigate the "sham" that took place in 2018.
"The congressional report published today confirms what we long suspected: The FBI supplemental investigation of then-nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh was, in fact, a sham effort directed by the Trump White House to silence brave victims and other witnesses who came forward and to hide the truth," said Katz and Lisa Banks, another attorney who represented Blasey Ford.
Whitehouse said his investigation showed how the FBI's supplemental background investigation process "can be easily manipulated," and "would benefit from greater transparency."
"The FBI and White House should implement clear, written procedures that apply uniformly to the conduct of supplemental
background investigations—or at least to situations like the Kavanaugh nomination, where major allegations of misconduct surface after a nominee's initial background investigation is complete," reads the report. "Only then can the Senate be assured that a supplemental background investigation is used to gather rather than suppress information."
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Progressives Demand Probe After Revelations About FBI Investigation of Kavanaugh
"Survivors deserve justice, and the country deserves to know the full truth of this situation, as well as the lengths the Trump administration was willing to go to cover up the truth."
Jul 22, 2021
Rights groups and other progressives are demanding a probe of the FBI's rushed and limited 2018 background investigation into U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh after seven Democratic senators on Thursday revealed new details about the bureau's actions.
Kavanaugh was nominated to the court by former President Donald Trump and narrowly confirmed by GOP senators in October 2018, despite allegations of sexual assault, which Kavanaugh has denied. A newly released letter to lawmakers from the FBI sheds light on--but also raises more questions about--how the bureau handled its investigation of those allegations.
In August 2019, Sens. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) and Chris Coons (D-Del.) sent a letter (pdf) asking FBI Director Christopher Wray to provide a full picture of the bureau's 2018 supplemental background investigation of Kavanaugh. On June 30, 2021, they finally received a response (pdf) from Jill C. Tyson, an FBI assistant director.
The FBI's letter, which the senators made public, says in part that:
Justice Kavanaugh's nomination was the first time that the FBI set up a tip line for a nominee undergoing Senate confirmation. It was established at the direction of the FBI's Security Division to centralize and manage incoming information related to the nomination. The FBI received over 4,500 tips, including phone calls and electronic submissions. The Security Division section handling the BI and supplemental background investigations provided all relevant tips to the Office of White House Counsel (as the requesting entity).
In a joint statement Thursday, Whitehouse and Coons, along with Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii), and Cory Booker (D-N.J.), revealed they sent Wray another letter (pdf) Wednesday evening to request more information.
"The admissions in your letter corroborate and explain numerous credible accounts by individuals and firms that they had contacted the FBI with information 'highly relevant to... allegations' of sexual misconduct by Justice Kavanaugh, only to be ignored," the senators wrote. "If the FBI was not authorized to or did not follow up on any of the tips that it received from the tip line, it is difficult to understand the point of having a tip line at all."
Whitehouse was more blunt in remarks to The New York Times, suggesting that the FBI ran a "fake tip line that never got properly reviewed, that was presumably not even conducted in good faith."
Progressive activists and advocacy organizations were similarly critical and demanded action from Congress and the U.S. Department of Justice.
\u201cThis is mind blowing. The Trump administration was pulling the strings during the deeply flawed Kavanaugh investigation. \n \nWe need hearings and an investigation. Now.\n\n#CourtsMatter\nhttps://t.co/CmIsXfXp15\u201d— Ben Jealous (@Ben Jealous) 1626973162
"Three years ago, our nation watched as Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez shared their painful stories with the world about Brett Kavanaugh's abusive behavior. Today, we learn that our institutions failed them both," said Shaunna Thomas, executive director of the national gender justice group UltraViolet.
Thomas called the recent revelations "deeply troubling" and said that "the Senate Judiciary Committee should hold a public hearing on the handling of the investigation by the FBI and interference from the White House Counsel and release those findings publicly."
"We owe it to survivors to ensure that they have systems of justice that treat their accusations seriously--and the failure to do so in this case is not only a betrayal of these survivors' trust, but of our nation's justice system as a whole," she said.
Wade Henderson, interim president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, similarly recalled witnessing "incredible courage as Dr. Christine Blasey Ford shared her truth with the world."
Henderson continued:
Today's revelations confirm and make more dire what we knew at the time--the allegations by Dr. Blasey Ford and Debbie Ramirez against Brett Kavanaugh were grossly mishandled. The Trump White House and Senate Republicans shamefully stifled an investigation to rush the process and guarantee their nominee a seat on the Supreme Court. These unconscionable actions undermine the Senate's constitutional role and continue to cast a shadow on the integrity of the court.
There are still numerous unanswered questions in the absence of a full and comprehensive investigation that should have taken place. We call for a full investigation into the large number of tips the FBI received about Justice Kavanaugh, how this process came to be, and who was involved. There must be full accountability.
Alliance for Justice president Nan Aron concurred, noting that "we have said since the beginning that the FBI's investigation during Justice Kavanaugh's confirmation process was a sham designed to protect his reputation instead of investigate credible allegations of sexual assault against him."
Aron called for the Justice Department to "immediately reopen its investigation into the past behavior of Justice Kavanaugh and determine if he intentionally misled Congress and the American public during his confirmation hearings."
She said the DOJ should also "conduct an expeditious review of how this investigation was conducted and share the details with the public."
Applauding the senators who continue to push for answers, Aron added that "survivors deserve justice, and the country deserves to know the full truth of this situation, as well as the lengths the Trump administration was willing to go to cover up the truth about Kavanaugh's behavior and ensure his confirmation."
\u201cThere is nothing stopping Democrats in the House and/or Senate from interviewing the witnesses the FBI never spoke to, and collecting the FBI tips the Trump White House apparently buried, as part of its own investigation into whether Kavanaugh committed perjury.\u201d— Brian Fallon (@Brian Fallon) 1626974665
Like Aron, Demand Justice executive director Brian Fallon highlighted his organization's long-standing critiques of Kavanaugh's elevation to the Supreme Court and declared that "the public deserves to know the truth about the cover-up that took place in 2018 and what the Trump administration may have concealed."
"Unlike in the fall of 2018, Democrats now hold the gavels in both the Senate and House," Fallon noted. "With so much credible evidence that Kavanaugh committed perjury, the relevant committees should be mounting their own investigation by directly interviewing the witnesses the FBI never spoke to, collecting the tips the Trump White House tried to bury, and insisting on the records from the National Archives that were withheld in 2018."
\u201cToday's news from @nytimes confirms what we have known for the last three years: the Senate, the Trump White House, and the FBI grossly mishandled Dr. Christine Blasey Ford\u2019s brave testimony.\n\nWe demand immediate action, and accountability now. https://t.co/RLd4d64IKo\u201d— National Women's Law Center (@National Women's Law Center) 1626970616
Ford's attorneys, Debra S. Katz and Lisa J. Banks, also responded to the revelations in a statement. The FBI's letter, they said, "confirms what we knew"--that the bureau's investigation into Ford's allegations against Kavanaugh "was a sham and a major institutional failure."
"This never should have been an ordinary background check," Katz and Banks continued, noting that the FBI refused to interview Ford or the corroborators listed in their letter to the bureau's director.
"The FBI should have referred the evidence it was receiving to the Criminal Investigation Division. FBI Director Wray must answer the question as to why he failed to do so," the pair added. "Because the FBI and Trump's White House Counsel hid the ball on this, we do not know how many of those 4,500 tips were consequential, how many of those tips supported Dr. Ford's testimony, or how many showed that Kavanaugh perjured himself during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee. Our nation deserved better."
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The Traumatizing Terror of Trump's Debate Performance: We Just Witnessed an Assault on Democracy
In the first confrontation between Donald Trump and Joe Biden, democracy lost and the audience took a beating.
Sep 30, 2020
Let's talk about trauma.
That term has made the rounds extensively over the last decade or two, and to a particularly heightened degree within the last four. No coincidence there, considering the rise of the #MeToo movement and the national televised hearings for Brett Kavanaugh, who was confirmed to the Supreme Court despite testimony by Dr. Christine Blasey Ford alleging that he sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers.
But that event opened old wounds across the nation while also leading to profound and nuanced discussions about the lasting impact of trauma on its victims -- particularly the way that trauma plays havoc with the memory save for a few horrifying details.
Trauma's shock can numb us to the horrors in which we're engulfed, sometimes to the point of creating feelings of intense disturbance around events, places and practices that are under normal circumstances completely safe. Only those who deal out trauma or deny its existence dismiss its impact -- that is, if they even acknowledge they've traumatized anyone.
If you are wondering what any of this has to do with the chaos masquerading as a presidential debate on Tuesday night, then I can only guess you fall into one of two camps. Either you weren't watching -- a wise choice -- or you are so accustomed to Donald Trump passing off bullying as leadership that you don't see what occurred as a problem. And, I hate to break it to you, that makes you a participant in continuing the trauma cycle.
If we're going to discuss what happened on Tuesday night, we should be honest in the terms we use: that was not civilized discourse between Trump and his challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden. It was the first of what is supposed to be three debates, but who knows if the electorate has a stomach for two more of these? Nobody won. Everybody lost, with the world watching us fail and stumble.
This one took place at the Health Education Campus of Case Western Reserve University and Cleveland Clinic in Ohio before a small audience of each candidate's family and staffers. The setting itself might have a bitter irony to it if the confrontation's "moderator" Chris Wallace were able to get the candidates to engage in any substantive discussion about Trump's shoddy pandemic response, their differing approaches on mitigation strategies or even mask wearing. Biden's wife Jill wore a mask while sitting in the audience, as did Melania as she entered; Trump's children did not.
Only Biden seemed prepared to do any of those things. Trump came to his debate podium with his own plans, mainly a strategy to dominate airtime while knocking his opponent off-balance. His bludgeons of choice were cheap ad hominem attacks that had nothing to do with the topics at hand, and distractions from the topic of tax returns. Biden stayed on his game nevertheless, even keeping his temper in check save for the moments he took to state the obvious, as he did during Trump's attempt to bloviate as Biden talked about eliminating his administration's tax cuts.
"You're the worst president America has ever had, come on," Biden fumed.
To some, Biden's appeals to those who have lost loved ones to COVID-related illnesses are a demonstration of his sensitivity to the woes and concerns of the common man. Trump's bombastic theatrics in the face of this were a show for his base, for whom such aggressive displays are markers of strong leadership.
How do we process such derangement when it sustains itself over an hour and a half?
We can be understated, like your relative at holiday dinner who cuts the tension following a screaming match between that racist uncle and the cousin who's had enough with, "Who wants pie?" That's the tactic Fox News' Martha MacCallum adopted, describing Trump's tantrum "a tumultuous back and forth, no holds barred."
Her co-host Bret Baier, playing the part of the relative in denial about having a murderer in the family, described it thusly: "I do feel like we've been through something, and maybe you at home might feel it too."
Which is quite different from the position of CNN's Dana Bash: "That was a sh*tshow."
"We are beyond the partisan. We are beyond politics," declared her CNN coworker Van Jones. "We are in an immoral swamp of misbehavior that we wouldn't tolerate from our children in a kindergarten class."
We can be plainspoken in what the abuse in question implies, as Rachel Maddow was. "It feels like a choice between a type of civic normal politics, where there are debates, which have rules," she said "... or we have what we have seen tonight, and what this incumbent president is promising, which is a monstrous, unintelligible display of logorrhea which has absolutely nothing to do with civic discourse, with debate, or even with the integrity of the contest that they're about to approach."
Now that it's all over save for the night sweats, it's really important to understand what it was that Americans and untold millions in nations around the world were subjected to. MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace put it best when she framed it as an assault.
To her it was an assault on the senses, and she's not wrong. Debates can be tough to sit through for many reasons, and sometimes calling them crazy is a compliment. This was different. This was a televised assault on the last vestiges of decorum and whatever passes for normalcy in these deeply abnormal days we're living in. This was excruciating, like having klaxon horns taped to your ears while the cruise ship is sinking.
And while there are people who would excuse Chris Wallace for his inability to control Trump's wild bucking, Nicolle Wallace is having none of it. Neither should you. "Try driving down the freeway in a rainstorm with an eight year old in the back seat screaming," she said. "There's always something you can do...there's always something you can deprive a misbehaving child of. In this case it was Donald Trump desperate for the oxygen of airtime."
Tuesday's event was a brickbat to democratic etiquette, one that quickly got away from Chris Wallace and initially caught Biden off guard. Neither had faced this version of Trump before, a man backed into a corner but still secure in the completeness of his corruption, even with more than 206,000 Americans dead from COVID-19-related illnesses, the result of a pandemic he delayed in responding to, needlessly resulting in thousands more deaths.
This year's Trump model has shown us time and again that rules and laws don't apply to him. Therefore, his refusal to play by rules agreed upon by his team and Biden's prior to the debate should not have caught anyone flatfooted - and surely not Chris Wallace, whose previous turns as a debate moderator won him respect and acclaim from most quarters.
But Trump interrupted Biden almost constantly as Biden attempted to answer questions or respond to his opponent's statements. Furthermore, Trump blasted past Wallace's irritated admonishments that he adhere to the agreed-upon debate rules.
The Trump of 2016 that Hillary Clinton handily shredded was a game show host with a few tricks up his sleeve but no public service record and no political will backing his every move, regardless of how craven.
Today's Trump has ample experience in running roughshod over the media and distorting facts and reality itself to the point that his followers will believe his lies more than they trust science, facts and history. CNN's Daniel Dale was on deck to fact check Trump but wasn't machine-gunning correctives on Twitter as he might have been in the past, because most of the lies Trump repeated last night are among his greatest hits.
Anyway, fact checks barely matter anymore since the people who support Trump don't believe anything that doesn't come from his mouth. Cutting his mic could be a solution for future moderators, but in order for that to work he'd have to agree to it in the debate negotiations, and what's the likelihood of that happening?
The days and hours leading up to the debate were full of chatter questioning its purpose. After what we saw on Tuesday, those skeptics have a point. In elections past presidential debates served as a means of contrasting one candidate's temperament against that of his or her opponent. Ideological differences and a demonstrative confidence in one's platform play some role here, but they're really about selling the public on who these candidates are as people.
Tuesday's performance didn't illuminate anything about Trump or his leadership style that Americans didn't already know. Instead it painted Trump as "the abuser" of the proceedings, in Nicolle Wallace's words - and, as she pointed out, that places Chris Wallace among the abused.
"This is a serious subject," Wallace said at one point, "so"... deep sigh ... "let's try to be serious about it."
Wallace did what he believed he could do, asking the candidates questions about healthcare, the pandemic, race, the Supreme Court and to the surprise of many, climate change.
But Trump's chest thumping, whether via his cheap shots at Biden's intelligence or his attempts to denigrate the military record of Biden's late son Beau, or to bring up the widely discredited and unsubstantiated corruption allegations about Hunter Biden's business dealings in Ukraine, ensured that none of the important answers stuck. Instead we're still worried about the same thing he had us fretting over before the debate, which is his refusal to guarantee a peaceful transition of power.
However, as much as Biden could do so, the debate allowed him to speak directly to the audience by looking into the camera while Trump glowered at him. In those fleeting moments it might not have mattered that we couldn't absorb what either man was saying - if Biden needed to play the role of the adult in the room while his opponent was erupting in plain sight, achievement unlocked. For a sound bite or two.
Whereas Trump's method is a favorite among assailants, which is to stun.
When Chris Wallace asked Trump if he were willing to disavow white supremacy, he called out the white supremacist group the Proud Boys by name, telling them to "stand down and stand by." Later, he made the alarming suggestion that his supporters show up at polling places on election day to supervise the process.
Of course, he also made that comment during an uninterrupted two-minute closing rant devoted to undermining the election and spewing falsehoods about mail-in voting - time which, according to the debate rules he steamrolled for the previous 80-something minutes, he was allowed.
So what will we remember about Tuesday night's debate, besides the existential terror, disillusionment and resultant depression produced by watching it?
Before answering that, let's consider what we can recall about presidential debates past. Ronald Reagan won the election in 1980 with a few humorous zingers that made him seem like an amicable old guy and by asking voters a simple question: "Are you better off than you were four years ago?"
Mitt Romney lost in 2012 on that unforgettable "binders full of women" comment. The simplest words can be a candidate's making or undoing.
No such punchlines sealed the deal for either candidate last night, which is appropriate for a night with no winners and millions of people nursing bruised psyches. Biden might have come close when he attempted to commiserate with Wallace as Trump kept interrupting Joe Biden. "It's hard to get any word in with this clown," Biden said before making a theatrical feint at decorum: "...excuse me, this person."
But to Trump, the performer with a talent for seeming unproduced when the truth is quite the opposite, this election isn't about a motto or a good line, or persuasion. Tuesday's debate was meant to dissuade anyone who thinks their vote might make a difference from even trying to pry him from office -- the act of a man who Maddow explains is running against the election itself. It was to numb us into despair and inaction. That's how abusers maintain their power over others.
As a nation we may not recall many specifics about Blasey Ford's testimony, but the line I'll never forget is this. "Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter, the uproarious laughter between the two. And their having fun at my expense."
She was referring to referring to Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge, who she recalls being present when Kavanaugh allegedly held her down and pushed his hand over her mouth.
If we're going to make it through two more of these, we're going to have to adopt a survivor's mentality, be on our guard and brace ourselves for a slightly different version of the same kind of vitriol.
It starts by refusing to call what happened on Tuesday night a debate.
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