Friday, October 5, 2018

Release the documents

On the Senate floor late Thursday, Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) made a new and tantalizing claim about what’s in the FBI documents on Brett M. Kavanaugh that all senators have now reviewed. Senators are severely limited in what they can say about these documents, which are summaries of the interviews that the FBI conducted as part of their renewed background check into Kavanaugh, after Christine Blasey Ford went public with charges that he sexually assaulted her, which led to a host of new claims like that one and others about his drinking at the time.

Warren noted these limitations and said the following (emphasis added):
“Senators have been muzzled. So I will now say three things that committee staff has explained are permissible to say without violating committee rules. … One: This was not a full and fair investigation. It was sharply limited in scope and did not explore the relevant confirming facts. Two: The available documents do not exonerate Mr. Kavanaugh.

And three: the available documents contradict statements Mr. Kavanaugh made under oath. I would like to back up these points with explicit statements from the FBI documents — explicit statements that should be available for the American people to see. But the Republicans have locked the documents behind closed doors.”
[...]

It is hard to know what to make of this. It could simply be a reference to, say, the testimony of Deborah Ramirez. Perhaps she repeated to the FBI her claim that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her at Yale. This would “contradict” Kavanaugh’s under-oath testimony, but it wouldn’t move the ball beyond what we know.

Or, alternatively, this could hint at something more serious.

[...]

We have plenty of these public statements to the media — indeed, three of Kavanaugh’s Yale drinking buddies have published a new piece claiming that Kavanaugh did lie under oath about not blacking out while drinking. But info collected by the FBI would be another matter.

“If the FBI has information from Judge or from Smyth that contradicts either their earlier statements or Kavanaugh’s testimony, that would be a big deal, and something I would think the Senate would be concerned about,” Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, told me today. “But we have no way of knowing if it’s that or something far more benign.”

  WaPo
If it were something benign, I would think they'd know people would assume the worse if they keep it hidden.
Republicans and Democrats are telling vastly different stories about what [the FBI] findings show: Republicans are claiming there was no corroboration of any of the charges against Kavanaugh and that there’s nothing new in them. Democrats are claiming not just that the investigation was a sham but also that it doesn’t exonerate Kavanaugh at all.

[...]

Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.) put out a statement saying that “to say that this investigation exonerates Judge Kavanaugh,” or to say that “there is no hint of misconduct in these documents,” is “just not true.” Warren went further than this — which seems significant — but both their statements are maddeningly vague.
Governing in secret is the American Way. It's hardly worthy of being called a democracy.

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

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