Why Brett Kavanaugh Might Lose Supreme Court Seat After Sexual Assault Allegation [Updated]

By Jonathan Chait

Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who wrote the letter accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, is going public with her story, saying she thought he might kill her. 'I thought he might inadvertently kill me,' said Ford to The Washington Post.  According to the Washington Post, Mrs. Ford is now a 51-year-old professor at Palo Alto University who teaches in a consortium with Stanford University, training graduate students in clinical psychology. Her work has been widely published in academic journals.. 'He was trying to attack me and remove my clothing.' Ford said she was able to escape when Kavanaugh's classmate at Georgetown Preparatory School, Mark Judge, jumped on top of them and sent them tumbling. She said both classmates were heavily inebriated. "Now I feel like my civic responsibility is outweighing my anguish and terror about retaliation."Mrs. Ford took a polygraph test in August on the advice of her lawyer. The test showed that her account was truthful.
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Republican Sen. Jeff Flake (top), whose vote could make or break Brett Kavanaugh's Supreme Court nomination, is saying he would vote no on the nominee unless he hears from Christine Blasey Ford. Flake, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, would be the key on a committee split between 11 Republicans and ten Democrats. 'If they push forward without any attempt with hearing what she's had to say, I'm not comfortable voting yes,' he told Politico. Sen. Bob Corker, Republican from Tennessee, also said the Senate Judiciary Committee should not vote on Kavanaugh's nomination until they talk to his accuser, and Sen. Lisa Murkowski said the committee might have to consider delaying the vote, according to reporting by CNN and other news organizations. 
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[NY Times:] Ms. Ford’s account comes as Democrats are already raising questionsabout Judge Kavanaugh’s truthfulness during his confirmation hearings this month. They have accused him of dissembling on a range of issues from his time in the George W. Bush White House, including a breach of secret Democratic files on judicial nominations and discussions about detainee policy and torture.



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[Washington Post:] Ford said she told no one of the incident in any detail until 2012, when she was in couples therapy with her husband. The therapist’s notes, portions of which were provided by Ford and reviewed by The Washington Post, do not mention Kavanaugh’s name but say she reported that she was attacked by students “from an elitist boys’ school” who went on to become “highly respected and high-ranking members of society in Washington.” The notes say four boys were involved, a discrepancy Ford says was an error on the therapist’s part. Ford said there were four boys at the party but only two in the room.  

Notes from an individual therapy session the following year, when she was being treated for what she says have been long-term effects of the incident, show Ford described a “rape attempt” in her late teens. 

In an interview, her husband, Russell Ford, said that in the 2012 sessions, she recounted being trapped in a room with two drunken boys, one of whom pinned her to a bed, molested her and prevented her from screaming. He said he recalled that his wife used Kavanaugh’s last name and voiced concern that Kavanaugh — then a federal judge — might one day be nominated to the Supreme Court.

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In his senior-class yearbook entry at Georgetown Prep, Kavanaugh made several references to drinking, claiming membership to the “Beach Week Ralph Club” and “Keg City Club.” He and Mark Judge are pictured together at the beach in a photo in the yearbook.

Judge (above) is a filmmaker and author who has written for the Daily Caller, the Weekly Standard and The Post. He chronicled his recovery from alcoholism in “Wasted: Tales of a Gen-X Drunk,” which described his own blackout drinking and a culture of partying among students at his high school.  Kavanaugh is not mentioned in the book, but a passage about partying at the beach one summer makes glancing reference to a “Bart O’Kavanaugh,” who “puked in someone’s car the other night” and “passed out on his way back from a party.”

Through the White House, Kavanaugh did not respond to a question about whether the name was a pseudonym for him.

Ford said she has not spoken with Kavanaugh since that night. And she told no one at the time what had happened to her. She was terrified, she said, that she would be in trouble if her parents realized she had been at a party where teenagers were drinking, and she worried they might figure it out even if she did not tell them.

“My biggest fear was, do I look like someone just attacked me?” she said. She said she recalled thinking: “I’m not ever telling anyone this. This is nothing, it didn’t happen, and he didn’t rape me.”

Years later, after going through psychotherapy, Ford said, she came to understand the incident as a trauma with lasting impact on her life. 

“I think it derailed me substantially for four or five years,” she said. She struggled academically and socially, she said, and was unable to have healthy relationships with men. “I was very ill-equipped to forge those kinds of relationships.”

She also said that in the longer term, it contributed to anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms with which she has struggled.

She married her husband in 2002. Early in their relationship, she told him she had been a victim of physical abuse, he said. A decade later, he learned the details of that alleged abuse when the therapist asked her to tell the story, he said.

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New York Daily Intelligencer:

Perhaps more promisingly, Maine’s Susan Collins and Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski (above) require some moderate and Democratic support for their reelections. The pressure to vote against Kavanaugh from female voters, who are already highly mobilized against Trump, might ramp up. They might also be unwilling to stomach the appointment of a credibly accused attempted rapist by a confessed sexual assault perpetrator, especially given that it may well lead to a historic constriction of women’s sexual autonomy.

The White House’s response to the allegation raises the cultural stakes of the fight. “A lawyer close to the White House” tells Politico not only that Kavanaugh will not be withdrawn, but that his confirmation represents a higher cause: “No way, not even a hint of it. If anything, it’s the opposite. If somebody can be brought down by accusations like this, then you, me, every man certainly should be worried.” It’s perfectly obvious why Donald Trump would be eager to defend the principle that men must not have their careers derailed by accusations of sexual assault. It’s less clear that 50 Republican senators will be eager to join him.

At minimum, it seems likely that additional hearings will need to be scheduled to explore the truth of the allegation. More evidence could come to light. And Republicans may not want spend the run-up to an election litigating an allegation that further defines their Trump-era identity as the party of unbridled male sexual entitlement. But at the moment, a question that appeared closed is suddenly very much open.

Manafort Agrees to Cooperate With Special Counsel; Pleads Guilty to Reduced Charges. His Flip is a Major Turning Point in the Mueller Investigation.

Mueller has been seeking this for nearly a year.

VOX

• Manafort could be sentenced to up to 10 years in jail and $500,000 in fines. If he fulfills the requirements of the plea bargain, prosecutors will dismiss five other charges against Manafort. [NBC / Tom Winter, Adam Edelman, Ken Dilanian, and Dartunorro Clark]
• Manafort is the first attendee of the Trump Tower meeting to flip — and he could answer some crucial questions about it. [Vox / Zack Beauchamp and Andrew Prokop]
• Many had previously speculated that Trump would pardon Manafort. In the wake of the plea deal, "that ship has really sailed." [CNBC / Michelle Fox]. If Trump were to pardon Manafort now, the special prosecutor already knows what Manafort said and can still compel him to testify,with a grand jury subpoena. He can compel him to testify at trial,".according to former Justice Department official Matt Miller. If Manafort gave answers that contradicted what he already told prosecutors under oath, he could be charged with perjury, Miller says.
• Famed defense attorney Alan Dershowitz, author of "The Case Against Impeaching Trump," told MSNBC on Friday, "There will be no pardon. It would backfire at this point because, number one, if he's given a pardon, then he can't take the Fifth Amendment," he said. "He would have to testify anyway. He could be called in front of a grand jury. So the pardon is off the table."

• Jed Shugerman, law professor, Fordham University:

  It’s important that Mueller has continued to make sure that a presidential pardon won’t save Manafort. Manafort is pleading guilty to only two charges — conspiracy and witness tampering — but he is conceding to the other facts in the “criminal information,” which establish money laundering and mention the money laundering statute. So Manafort would still face slam-dunk state charges for money laundering, bank fraud, state tax fraud, and other crimes if he were to receive a presidential pardon (which affects only federal crimes).

  Ric Simmons, law professor, Ohio State University: "And the fact that Manafort is now cooperating with Mueller will make any pardon seem like a cover-up."

• Andy Wright, senior fellow and founding editor of the legal blog Just Security:

• Manafort has deep and longstanding ties to Russian oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin and represented the interests of Russian-backed Ukrainian political entities. He was there for many of the central events under scrutiny by the special counsel, including the June 2016 meeting at Trump tower with Russian emissaries offering dirt on Hillary Clinton and the platform change at the Republican National Convention that benefitted Russia. He will likely know what Trump personally knew about those events.
  It is clear that President Trump is concerned about what Manafort might say. The president has reportedly told associates Manafort could incriminate him. (and his relatives). Manafort’s plea will cap his imprisonment for these charges at 10 years, and he will get the benefit of a significant reduction if he provides robust and truthful cooperation.

  
  

  Christopher Slobogin, law professor, Vanderbilt University:

  Everything depends on the content of the “cooperation agreement.” If, as reported, Manafort has agreed to testify in “other proceedings” and provide documents to the special counsel, there is high likelihood that, given Mueller’s mandate, Manafort will provide information relevant to the investigation of Trump’s presidential campaign. But, of course, we still have no information about the precise content of that testimony or evidence.

The Mueller charges so far, explained.

In May 2017, Mueller was appointed to investigate Russian interference with the 2016 election, including potential connections to the Trump campaign.

What’s happened since has been rather complex — indictments of or guilty pleas from 32 people and three companies.

In retrospect, though, we can break down the charges so far into two major categories.

Pressuring former Trump aides to cooperate: Mueller seems to have started off by trying to “flip” key Trump associates, getting them to agree to plea deals in which they’d cooperate.

Four people fall into this category. George Papadopoulos and Michael Flynn both struck plea deals after admitting lying to the FBI about their contacts with Russians. Then Paul Manafort and Rick Gates both struck plea deals after being charged in relation to their Ukrainian lobbying work (though it took a while, and a conviction on eight counts, until Manafort did).

The results varied a bit. Mueller’s team recently washed their hands of Papadopoulos, claiming he didn’t end up providing any information of use. Flynn and Gates, however, have been cooperating for months now.

Now there’s Manafort, whose cooperation has only just begun. This resolves the final loose end from those initial charges Mueller’s team brought last year. And given the amount of resources and hours Mueller’s team poured into the Manafort prosecutions, it certainly seems that they believe he’s quite important to their investigation overall.

Charges of overseas Russians for election interference: The second big batch of Mueller charges so far are in his two high-profile of indictments of Russians for allegedly interfering with the campaign.

There are two big cases in this category — the “Russian troll farm” indictment (alleging a social media propaganda effort aimed at influencing the election) and the email hacking indictment (alleging that 12 Russian intelligence officers were involved in hacking and leaking Democrats’ emails).

Mueller’s strategy here seemed to be to document certain facts about Russian interference in public charging documents.

He likely didn’t expect either of these cases to go to trial, since the indicted Russians wouldn’t come to the US to face charges. However, one company involved in the troll farm case has been fighting the charges and could force a trial.

In any case, Mueller has handed off both of these Russian cases to others in the Justice Department. He has, it seems, cleared his plate for what comes next.

So what comes next?

As serious as the above charges are, none of them directly allege that Trump associates criminally conspired with Russians to interfere with the 2016 election.

However, many believe that Mueller is using these indictments essentially as building blocks for his larger case on that central matter. He’s lined up his cooperating former Trump aides, and he’s indicted some Russians. It would seem natural for the next step to be connecting those two threads.

Indeed, reports sourced to people interviewed by Mueller’s team (and government officials the team has contacted) have made clear the special counsel has been delving deep into Trump and his associates’ ties to Russia.

The apparent goal has been to understand whether a conspiracy to interfere with the 2016 election did take place, and if so, what it entailed. The topics they’ve dug into include:

• The Trump Tower meeting: In June 2016, Donald Trump Jr. eagerly accepted an invitation to meet with a Russian delegation at Trump Tower to get dirt on Hillary Clinton, which was said to be part of the Russian government’s support for Trump. Paul Manafort attended too. So far, all parties have denied that it resulted in much of anything.
• The Trump Organization: Earlier this year, Mueller’s team subpoenaed Trump’s business for documents, including some related to Russia, the New York Times reported.
• Russian oligarchs: Mueller’s team surprised two Russian oligarchs at US airports this year, and questioned them about their ties to people in Trump’s orbit. He seized electronic devices from one oligarch. Manafort, too, was trying to get in touch with a Russian oligarch during the campaign.
• The Trump campaign’s digital operation: Mueller’s team interviewed people involved with Trump’s digital team with an eye toward understanding whether they’d coordinated with Russian online efforts, Yahoo News and ABC News have reported.
• Trump’s inauguration: The special counsel has also investigated Russia-tied donations to Trump’s inaugural committee, and the “unusual access” that certain Russians got to inaugural events, per ABC News.
• The Seychelles meeting and Gulf money: Shortly before Trump’s inauguration, a donor of his (Erik Prince) held a mysterious meeting in Seychelles with a Russian fund manager. The meeting was facilitated by the crown prince of the United Arab Emirates and his adviser, George Nader. It has also emerged that after Don Jr.’s Russian meeting at Trump Tower, he held another meeting about election assistance — with Prince and Nader. Mueller’s team served Nader with a subpoena in the US and has brought him before the grand jury. Keep an eye on this one.

• Roger Stone’s associates: Particularly in the past few months, Mueller has sought to question many people in the orbit of longtime on-and-off Trump adviser Roger Stone. Stone was in contact with WikiLeaks and the Guccifer 2.0 persona (which was run by Russian intelligence) during the campaign, making him a figure of interest in the question of whether Trump associates were involved in the release of those stolen Democratic emails.
• Obstruction of justice: On top of that, there is Mueller’s investigation into whether President Trump obstructed justice while in office — in pressuring then-FBI Director James Comey to drop an investigation into Michael Flynn, later firing Comey, pressuring Attorney General Jeff Sessions, and a plethora of other actions. The special counsel’s team interviewed many current and former White House and administration officials about these topics last year.

Which of these, if any, will result in further charges remain unclear. It’s also not known for sure whether Mueller is preparing some sort of lengthy report on President Trump and Russian interference — perhaps to be sent to Congress for potential impeachment — or whether the next step is more indictments.

But Manafort could know a whole lot about any of these avenues of investigation. He chaired the Trump campaign, attended the Trump Tower meeting, was a longtime business partner of Roger Stone, and had worked for a Russian oligarch. Manafort could be very helpful for whatever Mueller has in mind.

So now we wait for the special counsel’s next move.

Days of Fear, Years of Obstruction

Why did the slump last so long? Cynical, bad-faith Republican politics.

PAUL KRUGMAN, NY TIMES

From Trump to Trade, the Financial Crisis Still Resonates 10 Years Later

ANDREW ROSS SORKIN, NY TIMES

This week is the 10th anniversary of the inflection point of the financial crisis: the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the biggest bankruptcy in history. To some, it feels like a long time ago.

Yet, its effects still echo in the way we live today — in the attitudes that pervade our economy, our culture and our politics. It is hardly a stretch to suggest that President Trump’s election was a direct result of the financial crisis.

The crisis was a moment that cleaved our country. It broke a social contract between the plutocrats and everyone else. But it also broke a sense of trust, not just in financial institutions and the government that oversaw them, but in the very idea of experts and expertise. The past 10 years have seen an open revolt against the intelligentsia.

Mistrust led to new political movements: the Tea Party for those who didn’t trust the government and Occupy Wall Street for those who didn’t trust big business. These moved Democrats and Republicans away from each other in fundamental ways, and populist attitudes on both ends of the spectrum found champions in the 2016 presidential race in Senator Bernie Sanders and Donald J. Trump.

“We are almost at each other’s throats when times are good,” said Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, the largest hedge fund in the world with some $150 billion in assets, and the author of a new book, “A Template for Understanding Big Debt Crises,” an exhaustive study of financial panics and the policies that both created and rescued them.

The deepest crises, he said, always lead to populism. And it should be no surprise that a crisis leads to conflict and, in some extreme cases, war. “I would be worried about the emergence of populism,” he said, “because populists tend to want to fight with the other side rather than try to find ways of getting through it.” Populists on every side of the political spectrum “have in common that they’re confrontational,” he said.

In the United States, the crisis exposed an economy that had been a charade — one that most Americans didn’t understand or appreciate. The use of debt had masked the real problems underneath the surface: a significant decrease in worker participation, automation that would take jobs and stagnant wage growth.

These issues long predated the crisis. But as Warren Buffett famously said, “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.”

In truth, our economy today is in much better shape than you might expect, with unemployment at 3.9 percent — lower than it was before the crisis.

Yet debates persist about the way the government, first under President George W. Bush and then under President Barack Obama, chose to respond to the crisis. Should it have done more directly for homeowners? Should it have demanded more onerous terms for the hundreds of billions of dollars in loans to the banks and bankers, like restricting compensation and firing executives to demonstrate more accountability? Should some bankers have gone to jail?

For some, it is tempting to think that the government should have taken a more populist approach itself. If it had offered more help directly to the public rather than what was perceived as bailing out the banks, there is a suspicion that divisions could have been lessened, yielding a more united United States.

But would it?

In Britain, the government did all those politically popular things: It restricted banker pay, it fired executives, it lent money to banks on onerous terms, it restricted spending.

It didn’t work. The British economy grew significantly slower than ours. And the resulting resentment and bitterness were much worse than our own, leading to a manifestation of populism even more drastic: the unimaginable vote to leave the European Union.

It’s not popular to say, but it’s clear that the financial crisis was so deep and so painful that whatever populist positions policymakers took, the positive feelings would have been short-lived.

It doesn’t help that the economic medicine used by policymakers after a crisis exacerbates those feelings of anger. The most efficient fix — lowering interest rates — helps the wealthy because they end up with cheaper mortgages and enjoy the benefits that low rates have on corporate growth. Those lower on the economic ladder, on the other hand, get little in interest on their savings. The gap between the haves and the have-nots widens.

Unmanageable debt is the match that lights the fire of every crisis. You can have as many bad actors on stage as you want — greedy bankers, inept regulators, conflicted credit rating agencies — but unless there is significant leverage in the system, there’s little danger of a crisis. Our national debt is more than $21 trillion, and it increased a trillion dollars in just six months under Mr. Trump, who rode populist and anti-establishment sentiment to the White House but whose policy choices have largely favored the wealthy.

That’s not the only cause for concern, either. If history tells us the political divisions we have seen since the financial crisis were predictable, then what does history have to say about what comes next?

[Read more at ANDREW ROSS SORKIN, NY TIMES )

Cuomo sails to primary victory, with eyes to the White House.

POLITICO

This time, conventional wisdom proved right.

The Associated Pressed called the Democratic Party vote for New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Thursday within a half hour of polls closing, beating back Cynthia Nixon’s anti-establishment attack from the left with a message of experienced leadership.

Although Cuomo tried to position the race as a contest between himself and President Donald Trump, who is deeply unpopular in many areas of his home state, the primary election became a referendum on Cuomo’s eight years in office, his centrist style of governing and the state’s Democratic establishment.

Now as Cuomo positions himself for a possible 2020 presidential run, he’ll do so as the head of New York’s sizable Democratic majority in a state that fashions itself as a leader in challenging Trump’s actions to push the country to the right.

Officially, Cuomo says he's not running, but with 88 percent of districts reporting Cuomo posted big numbers, beating Nixon roughly 65 to 35 percent, he has some momentum.

And unlike some Democrats, the primary showed Cuomo’s willingness to move where the party is going.

“Even though he’s been a centrist moderate Clintonista he has shown that he can be pushed to the progressive wing of the party rather swiftly and easily,” Fordham political science professor Christina Greer told POLITICO.

The race cemented both Mr. Cuomo’s standing as an unmatched force in New York politics and a merciless tactician with little regard for diplomacy.

Forget the House. It’s the battle for the Senate that could provide the most drama on election night.

By Dan Balz

September 8 at 12:38 PM

WASHINGTON POST

For months now, the focus of Campaign 2018, rightly, has been on control of the House. All the metrics continue to point to a midterm election in which Democrats could seize control of that chamber. But for sheer drama and unpredictability, the contest for control of the Senate could be the place to look.

The House is no slam-dunk for the Democrats, but most Republicans following the campaigns are genuinely worried and probably right to be that way. The overall environment is difficult for the GOP because of President Trump and because of the location of the competitive races; suburban areas as one example. There are so many Republican-held seats at risk (and very few Democratic seats in similar danger) that Democrats have multiple paths to pick up the 23 they need to flip the chamber.

The Senate is and has been a different story. There the Democrats’ prospects are much more difficult, in large part because of the two big structural differences with the battle for the House. If the terrain that will determine control of the House more generally reflects the breadth of the country, the campaign for the Senate is largely playing out in the heart of Trump country.

Republicans are only defending nine of the 35 Senate seats up in November. They have to play far less defense than the Democrats. Second, many of the most competitive Democratic-held seats are in states Trump won easily in 2016: West Virginia by 42 points; North Dakota by 36 points; Montana by 20 points; Indiana and Missouri each by 19 points.

The range of possibilities in the Senate is not at all the same as in the House. No one questions whether Democrats will gain seats in the House in two months. The question is how many: a few short of the 23 they need, a few more than 23 or a lot more than 23. In the Senate, Republicans could, narrowly, lose control of the chamber or they could end up bolstering their slender two-seat majority.

The state of the races offers few definitive clues as to what is coming. Almost everywhere you look the contests are tight.

[Read more at WASHINGTON POST ]

In a Sign of the Economy’s Strength, Jobs and Wages Moved Higher in August

NY TIMES

The American economy’s stamina was showcased Friday as the government reported that wages in August sprinted forward at their fastest pace since the recession ended and that the job creation streak extended to 95 months.

But the Labor Department’s latest bulletin also hinted that President Trump’s tariffs could be starting to take a toll on manufacturing jobs.

NY TIMES

I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration

I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations. [Read the entire article here. NY TIMES]

WASHINGTON POST

Trump aides hunt for author of op-ed who claims to be part of a ‘resistance’ within administration

The unsigned opinion column attributed to a senior official, published anonymously in the New York Times, surfaced one day after the first excerpts emerged from Bob Woodward’s new book, in which President Trump’s top advisers painted a devastating portrait of the president and described a “crazytown” atmosphere inside the White House.

President slams ‘gutless’ op-ed

In a tweet, Trump said that if “the anonymous person does indeed exist, the New York Times must, for National Security purposes, turn him/her over to government at once!”

A never-ending cycle’: Book, op-ed show how some Trump aides work to curb his instincts

The disclosures this week crystallized what has long been evident throughout the Trump presidency: A cadre of administration officials have worked to curb his instincts on a range of issues, from national security to trade to immigration.

No, No, It Ain't Me Babe.

Dozens of insiders including Melania, Pence, Jared, Kelly, Mattis, Pompeo and Sessions insist it's not them.