Prosecutor Rachel Mitchell's former colleague weighs in

A former colleague of Rachel Mitchell, the sex crimes prosecutor hired by Senate Republicans to question Christine Blasey Ford, blasted Mitchell for writing a memo casting doubt on Ford’s allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Matthew Long, a former sex crimes prosecutor who was trained by Mitchell in the Maricopa County, Arizona, attorney’s office, told Mother Jones the memo was “disingenuous” and inconsistent with Mitchell’s own practices as a prosecutor. “I’m very disappointed in my former boss and mentor,” Long said.

[...]

“A ‘he said, she said’ case is incredibly difficult to prove,” Mitchell wrote. “But this case is even weaker than that…I do not think that a reasonable prosecutor would bring this case based on the evidence before the Committee.”

  Mother Jones

She knows it's not a case for a prosecutor anyway, so that's just smokescreen.

“I find her willingness to author this absolutely disingenuous. She knows better,” Long said. “She should only be applying this standard when there’s an adequate investigation.” Rather than jump to conclusions, Mitchell should have laid out the steps that needed to be taken in order to gather enough information to make a determination about the case. “Mitchell doesn’t have sufficient information to even draw these conclusions,” he said.

She was paid for her services.

Mitchell’s memo emphasized Ford’s inability to recall with certainty the timeframe of Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual assault of her when they were both in high school. Mitchell pointed out that in some interviews, Ford said the attack happened in the “mid-1980s,” and in others, in the “early ’80s.” Long found this section of the memo insincere. “I challenge Ms. Mitchell directly on this issue, because her office often charges cases with a very expanded timeline,” he said. Victims are often unable to pinpoint the exact date of an attack, and Mitchell’s office, he said, will often bring charges for an act that can’t be narrowed down to a more specific time period than a window of several years. “I was trained explicitly by her to not consider this time thing as an inconsistency,” he said.

Long, who now works partly as a defense attorney, said he is currently defending a former police officer charged with a 30-year-old crime by Mitchell’s office, which has given a broad time range in which the crime is alleged to have taken place.

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Mitchell stated in her memo that potential witnesses named by Ford have “either refuted her allegations or failed to corroborate them” in signed statements submitted to the committee. “That’s absolute bullshit,” said Long, "[...] because all we have are these signed statements, which are unreliable. They’re hearsay. They wouldn’t meet any type of standard Ms. Mitchell would allow in considering their statements, but instead would have demanded they be interviewed in a full-blown interview to really flesh out these people’s motivations.” As a judge, he added, Kavanaugh, who leaned on these statements in his own testimony before the Senate, knows they do not meet a standard of reliable testimony.

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“Her only analysis should have been: The process you’ve given me, the information we have, is insufficient.” [...] Moreover, he noted, she didn’t analyze Kavanaugh’s testimony, which contained obvious falsehoods already pointed out by the media, or remark on the unreliability of the accused. To Long, the memo reflected the political theater of a fraught Supreme Court battle rather than the expertise of a seasoned prosecutor. “Rachel Mitchell’s failure to include any analysis of Kavanaugh reveals her political bias,” he said. he said.

As I said, she was paid for her services.

And, to me, this stands out as particularly damning of Mitchell's memo:

“The spotty memory Ms. Mitchell talks about, as if that’s an indication it didn’t happen, is just absurd,” he said. “Again, I was trained by Ms. Mitchell about how trauma explicitly does prevent memory from happening.” Trauma causes the body to go into “fight, flight, freeze,” a survival mode that creates tunnel vision and prevents certain memories from forming that might otherwise have been retained. “I was trained explicitly by Ms. Mitchell to identify that as corroborative, as corroborating that someone has been victimized and experienced trauma,” he stressed. “Ms. Mitchell knows better than that.”

Also, Mother pulled out a great Kavanaugh quote:

In 2015, Kavanaugh gave a speech—titled “The Judge as Umpire”—at the Columbus Law School at Catholic University. It was during this event that he now-infamously said, “What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep.” But later in the speech, Kavanaugh explained the importance of judicial temperament. He described the attributes required for a “good judge”: to have the “proper demeanor,” to keep “our emotions in check,” to be “calm amidst the storm,” and to “demonstrate civility.” And, Kavanaugh added, “Don’t be a jerk.”

To be a good judge and a good umpire, it’s important to have the proper demeanor. Really important, I think. To walk in the others’ shoes, whether it be the other litigants, the litigants in the case, the other judges. To understand them. To keep our emotions in check. To be calm amidst the storm. On the bench, to put it in the vernacular, don’t be a jerk. I think that’s important. To be a good umpire and a good judge, don’t be a jerk. In your opinions, to demonstrate civility—I think that’s important as well. To show, to help display, that you are trying to make the decision impartially and dispassionately based on the law and not based on your emotions. That we’re not the bigger than the game…There’s a danger of arrogance, as for umpires and referees, but also for judges. And I would say that danger grows the more time you’re on the bench. As one of my colleagues puts it, you become more like yourself—and that can be a problem.

  Mother Jones

Oh, it's a problem alright. Jerk.