Kavanaugh's shady finances, + GOP sham justice

Senate Republicans say they plan to forge ahead with a hearing next Monday whether Christine Blasey Ford is there or not, a take-it-or-leave-it gambit to put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court before the end of the month that risks backfiring politically.

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The committee’s GOP chairman, Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), scheduled Ford’s testimony before confirming that this day worked for her. He did, however, make sure it worked for President Trump’s nominee, who categorically denies any wrongdoing and has been holed up at the White House preparing for his second round in front of the Senate.

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Contrary to some semi-misleading coverage that’s out there this morning, Ford still wants to testify in a public setting. Moreover, the two-page letter from her lawyers does not explicitly say she will not come next Monday if there’s no FBI probe. “She will talk with the committee,” Lisa Banks, one of her lawyers, told Anderson Cooper on CNN. “She is not prepared to talk with them at a hearing on Monday. No legitimate investigation is going to happen between now and Monday. This is going to take some time. There shouldn't be a rush to a hearing here.”

  

I can see why they want to get Kavanaugh seated before the new Congress takes their seats in January, but I hear people saying they want him installed before Congress returns to session in October. Why? They're not going to have anything involving Trump come before the Supreme Court between now and October. And not even between now and November. Would a lame duck session sitting between November and January be any less likely to confirm Kavanaugh's nomination? I don't see why.

In other words, I don't get why there's any rush on this before January 2019. What it says to me is they know he's a sleazeball and they'd rather more of his sleaze did not become public. The longer they have to wait to vote on him, the more likely it is that some Republicans will have had more proof than they can afford to ignore.

And, perhaps some of it is just because they're beligerent, and no woman is going to tell them what to do.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.), the No. 3 in GOP leadership, told reporters that Ford is “not really in a position to make conditions.”

Other Republicans went further. “This has been a drive-by shooting when it comes to Kavanaugh,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) told Seung Min Kim. “I’ll listen to the lady, but we’re going to bring this to a close.” Graham added later, “We run the committee — not her lawyer, not the Democrats.”

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There is a danger for Republicans that this kind of brusque rhetoric toward a purported victim of sexual assault will be perceived as bullying by voters, especially the college-educated, suburban women who are poised to determine which party controls the House come November.

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Ford’s lawyers say quotes like the one from Graham prove that Republicans have already prejudged their client’s claims and thus showcase why an independent investigation is needed.

And that's absolutely true. “I’ll listen to the lady, but we’re going to bring this to a close.”

The professor’s eagerness to fully cooperate with the FBI is significant for another reason: Making a false statement to the bureau is a felony.

She knows that. And so does Kavanaugh. Another reason for Grassley, et al., to not allow an FBI investigation.

As of Tuesday evening, the Twitter account posting Ford’s address was still active, and another account had posted what it said was an aerial photo of Ford’s house.”

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Ford’s lawyers revealed that their client has received death threats, her private email has been hacked and she’s being impersonated online. Ford and her family have now moved out of their home, and she and her husband are staying apart from their two children as a safety precaution. Unlike Kavanaugh, Ford does not get a security detail.

Just abhorrent.

Meanwhile, Kavanaugh had a two-hour “murder board” yesterday at the Eisenhower Office Building to rehearse for next week. The judge practiced answering tough questions about his past, his partying, his drinking, his dating and Ford’s allegations, per Josh Dawsey. Participants in the session included White House counsel Don McGahn, press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and deputy chief of staff Bill Shine.

Shine’s role in prepping Kavanaugh is notable because of his scandal-plagued tenure as co-president of Fox News. He was pushed out of the cable network last year after multiple lawsuits suggested that he enabled alleged sexual harassment by Roger Ailes, his boss for 20 years.

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Avi Selk reports [...] “[Mark] Judge’s yearbook entry appears one page before the bio of … Kavanaugh. Both men graduated in 1983 … In two memoirs, Judge depicted his high school as a nest of debauchery where students attended ‘masturbation class,’ ‘lusted after girls’ from nearby Catholic schools and drank themselves into stupors at parties. He has since renounced that lifestyle and refashioned himself as a conservative moralist — albeit one who has written about ‘the wonderful beauty of uncontrollable male passion.’”

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Democrats asked to subpoena Judge to appear on Monday, but Republicans said no.

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Ford alleges that Mark Judge was in the room — laughing — when Kavanaugh pinned her down and attempted to rape her. But Judge’s lawyer sent a letter to the Senate yesterday saying his client does not want to appear or answer any questions. The lawyer said Judge has “no memory of this alleged incident.”

Oh, well, OK then. (Don't try this at home.)

Many women are rallying behind Ford. “Several former colleagues said that, as a biostatistician and psychologist, Ford was known for her scrupulous and meticulous professional conduct. She has published several books and more than 65 peer-reviewed journal articles,” the Associated Press reports from Palo Alto, Calif. “Her work often involves analyzing data gathered in medical studies ranging from investigations of new depression treatments to opioid addiction interventions and traumatic brain injury research.

“Sarah Adler, a former student of Ford’s who is now a clinical psychologist at Stanford, co-organized a letter in support of her former professor that had been signed by more than 300 colleagues and former students by Tuesday afternoon. Another letter of support has been signed by more than 700 graduates of her private prep school, Holton-Arms. ‘I think she felt morally compelled to come forward, which is very much in line with what I know of her,’ said Adler.

And the amoral, repugnant GOP is going to make her pay dearly.



Also, too...

Let us not forget the other reasons Kavanaugh should not be confirmed.

Kavanaugh’s explanation of his finances is not consistent with earlier explanations from the White House.

Questions have lingered since shortly after Kavanaugh’s nomination was announced in July and reporters digging into his public record found that Kavanaugh’s financial disclosure forms showed tens of thousands of dollars of fluctuating credit card balances as well as a loan against his retirement account for the 12 years before 2017. All of these debts disappeared from Kavanaugh’s financial disclosures in 2017 and the forms did not indicate an obvious source of funds to repay them, prompting speculation about potential conflicts of interest.

In July, White House spokesman Raj Shah offered an explanation of the debts to the Washington Post: that Kavanaugh had purchased season tickets to the Nationals for a group of friends, putting them on his credit card near the end of a year and collecting reimbursements the following year. That practice, along with some home-improvement expenses, resulted in the large year-end balances that appeared on his disclosure forms. Shah emphasized that Kavanaugh’s credit card balances were transitory and that he had discontinued the practice in 2017. “He did not carry that kind of debt year over year,” Shah told the Post.

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No senators asked about Kavanaugh’s financial situation during the televised hearings, but Democrats on the Judiciary Committee submitted several detailed questions in writing afterward.

Kavanaugh’s answers, released on Wednesday, contradict the White House account in many important respects. “Over the years, we carried some personal debt,” Kavanaugh wrote, referring to himself and his wife. But he denied that the debt was related to the baseball tickets in the way Shah had described — which would have amounted to loaning his friends the cost of their tickets until they got around to reimbursing him.

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The White House account implied that Kavanaugh had in effect loaned his friends the cost of the tickets for at least a month or two, while he financed the expense on his credit cards. Kavanaugh did not repeat that claim.

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“It’s strange to imagine that a man of comparatively modest means would put tens of thousands of dollars on credit cards to buy baseball tickets,” the Atlantic’s David Graham wrote at the time. Many also noted that Nationals’ season tickets simply aren’t expensive enough to explain such significant debt. And the friends who supposedly were part of this arrangement have never been identified or come forward.

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Kavanaugh’s new story about his credit card debt has the advantage of being far more plausible, allowing for the fact that it paints Shah as, to put it politely, misinformed. [...] It is eminently believable that the Kavanaugh family ran up substantial personal debt on their credit cards while they were trying to juggle living on a judge’s salary and bearing the expenses associated with climbing the ranks of Washington society, including membership in a ritzy country club. The new story no longer involves an eye-rolling account of a federal judge incurring high-interest credit card debt for unnamed friends. But it is notably missing the facts and figures that would allow others to verify its claims.

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Examined closely, the new story still does not provide a certain answer for how Kavanaugh repaid his credit credit cards; it contains an unexplained three-year gap.

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[Kavanaugh] and his wife were saddled with a credit card burden that, in fact, they did carry year over year — a financial anchor from which they couldn’t seem to free themselves for nearly a dozen years.

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And, perhaps the most concerning question: How did they manage, in 2017, to make all that debt go away?

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A class-action case decided in 2013 resulted in a pay increase and back pay for federal judges that started in 2014. Kavanaugh’s salary should have increased that year by $26,700 per year starting in January 2014 and he should have received approximately $150,000 in back pay as a lump sum in 2014 as well, according to a question posed to Kavanaugh by Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut.

However, Kavanaugh’s credit card debt problem was not solved in 2014. In fact, after declining somewhat from 2013 to 2014, Kavanaugh’s credit card balances increased dramatically during both 2015 and 2016, reaching levels in 2016 higher than they had been for a decade. The credit card balances finally vanish in 2017.

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The reported balance in Kavanaugh’s bank accounts doesn’t increase or decrease in 2014 or afterward, even though Kavanaugh should have been depositing bigger paychecks and a $150,000 lump sum payment. If for some reason Kavanaugh waited until 2017 to use his 2014 infusion of funds to pay down his credit cards, where did he deposit all that money in the interim?

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One possibility is that Kavanaugh extracted some equity from his home, through a cash-out refinancing or a second mortgage. However, Maryland real estate records reviewed by Yahoo News reveal that Kavanaugh refinanced his home twice, in 2014 and 2015, and neither refinancing increased the face amount of the mortgage; that appears to rule out a cash-out refinancing. In addition, there is no record of a second mortgage or home equity line of credit on the property.

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Another possibility is a wealthy benefactor. [...] Did his parents or other relatives pay off his debts? A gift from family appears to be the most plausible answer that is consistent with Kavanaugh’s written responses; however, nowhere in his answers does Kavanaugh confirm this seemingly harmless explanation.

Family help could also explain how Kavanaugh raised the down payment for his $1.2 million home in 2006. In his written explanation, Kavanaugh attributes this down payment primarily to the Thrift Savings Plan loan; however, according to Kavanaugh’s disclosure forms, that loan can only have provided up to $50,000 of the approximately $220,000 in cash that would have been due. How did Kavanaugh raise the other $170,000? His bank accounts don’t show the declining balances normally associated with making a sizable down payment. The funds might have come from his family, or maybe he put it on his credit cards.
  Yahoo

Or maybe he got it from someone connected to the Russian mob, or maybe GOP coffers, or the Federalist Society, all who wanted Kavanaugh on the bench.

The strange details in Kavanaugh’s disclosure forms, and the White House’s implausible gloss on them, fueled rumors throughout the summer of a darker explanation for Kavanaugh’s significant debts — some including gambling. These rumors were given some limited substance during the hearings when Democrats released and circulated one “committee confidential” email in which Kavanaugh apologizes to his friends for “growing aggressive after blowing still another dice game.” Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island added fuel to the fire by asking Kavanaugh several highly specific questions about gambling, including whether he had “ever sought treatment for a gambling addiction” and whether he had “ever had debt discharged by a creditor for losses incurred in the State of New Jersey.” In his answers, Kavanaugh flatly denied that he had ever sought treatment, had such a debt discharged, or accrued gambling debts at all.

Regardless of how he got the debt, the question remains: how did he get it paid off so suddenly?