Kavanaugh testimony fact check

The New York Times fact-checked his testimony, comparing his statements against the recollections of former classmates and acquaintances from his youth, as well as records from his time working in the administration of George W. Bush.

The combative nominee was compelled to answer questions he clearly found embarrassing or offensive. What emerges is the image of a skilled lawyer who, when pressed on difficult subjects, sometimes crafted responses that were misleading, disputed or off point. When asked about his alcohol consumption in high school, he said his classmates were “legal to drink” in their senior year, even though the legality of the drinking was not the issue (and, in fact, he could not legally drink because the age was raised to 21 before he even turned 18).

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The faded references to heavy drinking and sexual pursuits [in his 1982 calendar] had taken on evidentiary significance, and he was pressed by senators to acknowledge their meaning. Judge Kavanaugh instead offered benign alternative explanations — an apparent reference to throwing up from drinking could have referred to spicy foods upsetting his stomach, he said.

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At his first hearing, Judge Kavanaugh, a Yale Law School graduate, fielded questions on policy and political work in the bland, studiously noncontroversial tradition of nominees to the high court. Still, even then some answers raised flags, as when he claimed not to know or suspect that internal Democratic documents about judicial nominations, shared with him when he worked in the Bush administration, had been stolen from Democrats’ computers.

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Judge Kavanaugh repeatedly testified that three people had exonerated him of Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations that he sexually assaulted her during a gathering of teenagers outside Washington in the summer of 1982.

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While it is true that the three people did not corroborate Dr. Blasey’s account, they did not “refute” it either. Dr. Blasey had said that two of them were in the house, and one of them was in the room at the time of the alleged assault.

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All three said they did not recall the gathering, and two of them — friends of Judge Kavanaugh’s — said they had not, in general, seen him act in an aggressive manner.

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Judge Kavanaugh portrayed himself in his testimony as enjoying a beer or two as a high school and college student, but not as someone who often drank to excess during those years.

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In interviews before his testimony, nearly a dozen college classmates of Judge Kavanaugh’s said they recalled him indulging in heavy drinking, some saying it went beyond normal consumption. (To be sure, a smaller number of classmates said his drinking was unexceptional.)

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Reached after the hearing, Lynne Brookes, an undergraduate classmate of Judge Kavanaugh’s at Yale University, said she believed he had “grossly misrepresented and mischaracterized his drinking.”

“He frequently drank to excess,” she said. “I know because I frequently drank to excess with him.”

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Another Yale classmate, Elizabeth Swisher, now a Seattle physician, said: “I drank a lot. Brett drank more.”

“I definitely saw him on multiple occasions stumbling drunk where he could not have rational control over his actions or clear recollection of them,” said Daniel Lavan, who lived in Mr. Kavanaugh’s dorm freshman year. “His depiction of himself is inaccurate.”

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[Kavanaugh's] high school yearbook [...] refers to him as the treasurer of the Keg City Club, noting “100 Kegs or Bust.” Multiple high school classmates, in interviews, described Judge Kavanaugh as a heavy and frequent drinker.

  NYT

More precisely, he refers to himself as the treasurer of the Keg City Club. Students submitted their own "bios".

He also recounted his own drinking exploits in speeches. In a 2014 address to Yale Law students, he recalled a night of “group chugs” in Boston that ended with his group “falling out of the bus onto the front steps of Yale Law School at about 4:45 a.m.”

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In one entry, he described himself as a “Renate Alumnius,” referring to Renate Schroeder, now Renate Dolphin, who attended a nearby Catholic school. A number of his football teammates had similar entries. Judge Kavanagh said: “That yearbook reference was clumsily intended to show affection, and that she was one of us. But in this circus, the media’s interpreted the term is related to sex. It was not related to sex.”

Four of Judge Kavanaugh’s former schoolmates, including Sean Hagan, said the notion that the phrase was meant affectionately did not ring true. They said that Judge Kavanaugh and his friends often made disrespectful sexual comments about Ms. Dolphin, and that the understanding at the time was that the many yearbook references to her were boasts about sexual conquests.

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Judge Kavanaugh’s yearbook page included the entries “Judge — Have You Boofed Yet?” and “Devil’s Triangle.” On Thursday, he said that “boofed” meant “flatulence” and that “Devil’s Triangle” was a drinking game in which three glasses were arranged in a triangle.

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“Boofed” in the 1980s was a term that often referred to anal sex, and that is how Judge Kavanaugh’s classmates said they interpreted his comment. They said they had never heard it used to refer to flatulence.

Similarly, they said that they had never heard of a drinking game called Devil’s Triangle, but that the phrase was regularly used to describe sex between two men and a woman. “The explanation of Devil’s Triangle does not hold water for me,” said William Fishburne, who managed the football team during Judge Kavanaugh’s senior year.

“Our senior yearbook pages were a place to have a little bit of fun with commemorating inside jokes,” said Bill Barbot, who overlapped with Judge Kavanaugh at Georgetown Prep, an all-boys Catholic school. “However, the spin that Brett was putting on it was a complete overstatement of the innocence with which they were intended.”

I assume the FBI will talk to all these people, and I assume Republicans will discount them.

Asked about the intersection of his and Ms. Blasey’s friend groups, Judge Kavanaugh said: “When my friends and I spent time together at parties on weekends, it was usually with friends from nearby Catholic all-girls high schools — Stone Ridge, Holy Child, Visitation, Immaculata, Holy Cross. Dr. Blasey did not attend one of those schools. She attended an independent private school named Holton-Arms, and she was a year behind me.”

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“Holton-Arms was definitely part of our social scene,” Mr. Barbot said. Another Georgetown Prep alumnus who was in Judge Kavanaugh’s class said, “Holton was as much a sister school as the others.”

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During his confirmation hearings earlier this month, Judge Kavanaugh said that when he worked in the White House of George W. Bush, he was unaware that a Republican staffer had stolen documents about judicial nominations from the computer servers of Democratic lawmakers. He maintained that receiving the documents did “not raise red flags” because “information sharing was common.”

Documents released by the National Archives show that Manuel Miranda, the Republican aide, had sent Judge Kavanaugh several of the stolen files between 2002 and 2003. One email chain released by the Archives describes wanting to meet at Mr. Miranda’s house so that Judge Kavanaugh, who was a White House lawyer working on judicial confirmations, could receive “useful info” about two Democratic senators.

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Emails from Mr. Miranda to Judge Kavanaugh included remarkable detail about Democratic plans, and some were marked as “highly confidential” or “intel.”

But Judge Kavanaugh offered a more benign interpretation, saying that he merely assumed at the time that Mr. Miranda had received the information from friendly Democratic staffers.

Dear god. He's his own worst enemy under examination. I hope the FBI talk to him during their investigation.

In 2006, Judge Kavanaugh told senators that when he was in the White House Counsel’s Office, he did not work on a controversial appeals court nomination and played only a small role in another. The nomination of Judge William H. Pryor Jr. was “not one that I worked on personally,” he said. He also said that Judge Charles W. Pickering Sr. was “not one of the judicial nominees that I was primarily handling.”

"Primarily." He should have used that for Pryor, too.

Emails released after Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court showed that during his White House tenure, he was invited to participate in a conference call on Judge Pryor’s confirmation. The email went to a group called the “Pryor Working Group.” The emails also show that he worked on the Pickering nomination, and was called by one colleague “much more involved in the Pickering fight.”

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Judge Kavanaugh has sought to assure some senators — and the abortion rights groups that support them — by calling Roe v. Wade a matter of settled law. At a hearing on Sept. 6, he said the case was “an important precedent” and “has been reaffirmed many times.”

At the same hearing, the judge declined to directly answer questions by Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, as to whether he believed the 1973 ruling was “correct law.”

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Last year, he cited Roe v. Wade as an example of former Chief Justice William Rehnquist’s “massive and enduring impact on American law.” Chief Justice Rehnquist had dissented in the case.

And, while we're at it, let's fact check the asshat who nominated Kavanaugh...



False.  Kavanaugh has never been investigated by the FBI.  He's only had background checks done by them.  Background checks will not pick up anything that hasn't been reported to law enforcement if it has not been offered by the people interviewed, which consist mainly of the people the person being background checked lists as references and family.

...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.