Kavanaugh secures votes for confirmation to Supreme Court

Sens. Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.) said they will vote to confirm Judge Brett M. Kavanaugh, ensuring that President Trump’s nominee will ascend to the Supreme Court after a bitter partisan fight that has included allegations of decades-old sexual misconduct.

WOMAN OF THE HOUR: Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins

Alaska Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski voted 'no' on Friday's Kavanaugh motion, defying her party's leadership and giving Democrats hope that they could still reject Trump's nominee

Underscoring the strength of Democratic opposition, Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) called Kavanaugh’s nomination “one of he saddest, most sordid chapters in the long history of the federal judiciary.”

Kavanaugh addressed his comportment at the hearing in an extraordinary op-ed in the Wall Street Journal published Thursday night, acknowledging that he was “very emotional” during his testimony and “I said a few things I should not have said.”

“Going forward, you can count on me to be the same kind of judge and person I have been for my entire 28-year legal career: hard-working, even-keeled, open-minded, independent and dedicated to the Constitution and the public good,” Kavanaugh wrote.

 As she has done before, Senator Collins  suggested at great length that Kavanaugh’s respect for precedent — or to use his misleading term, ”settled law” — would keep him from tampering with reproductive rights. In an expression of either naïveté or cynicism, Collins did not acknowledge that the entire Federalist Society–run vetting process Trump used to select his SCOTUS nominee was designed precisely to prevent the possibility of any more “stealth” moderate Justices like many prior Republican appointments

Republicans Have Decided to Ignore All of Brett Kavanaugh’s Lies.

NEW YORK INTELLIGENCER, JONATHAN CHAIT

The FBI investigation into Brett Kavanaugh has turned out to be a fig leaf. Multiple reports tell the same story: The White House has controlled the probe, ignoring the attempts by multiple witnesses to reach investigators and wrapping up its work well before its already-tight deadline.

In the meantime, however, significant new evidence has appeared from the news media. It demonstrates beyond a doubt that Kavanaugh’s emotional testimony was a farrago of evasions and outright lies.

Tuesday, the New York Times delved into Kavanaugh’s high-school culture. It turned up several details casting serious doubt on the ancillary claims the prospective justice made. Kavanaugh wrote a letter describing himself and his friends as “prolific pukers,” undercutting his assurance to the Senate that his inclusion in the the “Beach Week Ralph Club” was a reference to a weak stomach for spicy food. His yearbook described girls from Holton-Arms — the alma mater of Christine Blasey Ford — as easy sexual conquests, contradicting Kavanaugh’s insistence that she would not have entered his social circle. (“My friends and I spent time together at parties on weekends, it was usually the — with friends from nearby Catholic all-girls high schools, Stone Ridge, Holy Child, Visitation, Immaculata, Holy Cross. Dr. Ford did not attend one of those schools. She attended an independent private school named Holton-Arms and she was a year behind me.”)

Read more at NEW YORK INTELLIGENCER, JONATHAN CHAIT

James Roche says he reached out to the FBI and discussed Kavanaugh's college drinking habits. Mark Judge (rt) did speak to the FBI

FBI Wraps Up Background Investigation  and Sends it to Senate. Just NINE interviews to clear Kavanaugh: Outrage grows over tiny scale of FBI probe that found nominee is NOT a sex abuser – with dozens saying they wanted to give evidence.

• Senators began reviewing the documents Thursday morning.



 Sen. Chuck Grassley (above), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, arranged for senators to view the FBI report on Kavanaugh on Thursday. Grassley got briefed on the report Thursday morning.

Stormy Daniels lawyer Michael Avenatti said 'six very damaging witnesses' were never interviewed
• Debbie Ramirez, who alleges Kavanaugh exposed himself to her, provided list of 20 potential witnesses. Lawyers for Ramirez wrote FBI director Chris Wray to complain that after agents interviewed Ramirez for two hours, they failed to follow up on leads she provided.



Protesters outside the Supreme Court

• Kavanaugh's college roommate James Roche wrote an op-ed Wednesday stating Kavanaugh was 'frequently, incoherently drunk' and that he was 'willing to speak with' the FBI
• The White House expressed confidence early Thursday that Brett Kavanaugh will win his Supreme Court confirmation fight.
• The Supreme Court nominee is to get a procedural vote on Friday.
•  
• Key swing Republican Susan Collins (rt.) says FBI probe "seems very thorough" and Jeff Flake says there is no extra corroboration. But both refuse to say how they will vote.
• Democrats have asked to see a copy of the directive that was sent to the bureau for the sake of transparency, but have been brushed off.

  Senate Democrats fume that the report  was 'limited' and 'incomplete' and accused the White House of constraining agents from questioning both Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, whose own attorneys called it a 'stain on the FBI.'

  Democrats have repeatedly questioned why more witnesses weren’t interviewed by FBI agents, who were reported to have only spoke to nine people in their five-day review of allegations against Kavanaugh.

  Democratic Sen. Ed Markey charged that the White House and Senate Republicans orchestrated a halfhearted FBI probe to protect Kavanaugh.

  'It's obviously a cover-up,' Markey told CNN. 'The Trump White House, working with the Republican leadership in the Senate, have deliberately circumscribed this investigation.'

  This whole thing is a sham. This stunted, strangled investigation was designed to provide cover, not to provide the truth,' 

Mitch McConnell is promising a vote on Kavanaugh's nomination as soon as Friday. McConnell keeps his focus on his goal of filling federal court vacancies with conservatives. His right wing goal's success would be climaxed by this, the second conservative judge appointed in little over a year. He will have secured a legacy of reshaping the courts to the right for at least the next twenty years.  

'Warn the neighbors that we're loud, obnoxious drunks with prolific pukers among us': Messy handwritten 'Beach Week' letter written by "Bart" Kavanaugh to his friends in 1983 surfaces after he told senators he 'didn't have a drinking problem.

Brett Kavanaugh (right, and inset at high school) wrote the letter (part of it pictured left) to seven of his Georgetown Prep classmates ahead of 'Beach Week' in 1983, when the group would be partying at a condo in Maryland. In the note, he expresses a fear of getting thrown out and suggests limiting the number of boys allowed to attend, but adds 'any girls we can beg to stay there [will be] welcomed with open... anyway, I think we're all set.' In a post-script, he jokingly describes the group as 'loud, obnoxious drunks with prolific pukers among us.' Kavanaugh's history of high school drinking has come under scrutiny since he was accused of sexual assault at parties by three women, including Christine Blasey Ford, who testified before the Senate last week.The Times contacted Kavanaugh about the letter, who confirmed that he wrote it ahead of 'Beach Week' in the summer of 1983, but refused to comment further.It is also significant that the letter is signed 'Bart', a name that Judge has used in his memoirs to describe a hard-drinking friend.

Judge wrote that a friend by the name of Bart O'Kavanaugh had once 'puked in someone's car' and 'passed out on his way back from a party' while describing a culture of 'blackout drinking' at high school.

Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes
as He Reaped Riches From His Father.

Trump was 'earning' $200,000 a year aged THREE and got $413 MILLION from his father, not the $1 million loan he claimed, reveals massive trove of family's secret tax and bank documents - which New York State says they will investigate.

Fred Trump undertook countless efforts to steer vast resources into Donald Trump's hands before his death, avoiding gift and estate taxes through under-valuations, according to a report. Trump was a millionaire by Age 8, according to a wealth of tax, loan, and corporation documents unearthed by the New York Times. He earned $1 million each year from father after graduating college and even got revenue from apartment laundry machines. Trump has refused to release his personal tax returns.

• Fred Trump wove a safety net that rescued his son from one bad bet after another:

• As the 1980s ended, Donald Trump’s big bets began to go bust — Trump Shuttle, the Plaza Hotel, the Atlantic City casinos. But as he careened from one financial disaster to another, family partnerships and companies dramatically increased their payouts.

• Between 1989 and 1992, four of the entities that Fred Trump created paid his son today’s equivalent of $8.3 million. And when Donald Trump pleaded with bankers for an emergency line of credit, he used as collateral the stake his father had given him in a group of apartment buildings.

• Tax records also reveal that at the peak of Mr. Trump’s financial distress, in 1990, his father extracted an extraordinary sum — nearly $50 million — from his empire. While The Times could find no evidence that Fred Trump made any significant debt payments, charitable donations or personal expenditures, there are indications that he wanted plenty of cash on hand to bail out his son if need be.

  That was what happened at Trump’s Castle casino, where an $18.4 million bond payment was due in December 1990. Fred Trump dispatched a trusted bookkeeper to Atlantic City with checks to buy $3.5 million in casino chips without placing a bet. With this ruse — an illegal loan under New Jersey gaming laws, resulting in a $65,000 civil penalty — Donald Trump narrowly avoided defaulting on his bonds.

• 

• Father and son set out to create the myth of a self-made billionaire.
• All told, The Times documented 295 distinct streams of revenue Fred Trump created over five decades to channel wealth to his son.
  But the partnership between Donald Trump and his father was about more than the pursuit, and the preservation, of riches. They were also confederates in a more ambitious project: creating the myth of Donald J. Trump, Self-Made Billionaire. If Fred Trump was the silent partner, helping finance the accouterments of wealth, it was Donald Trump who spun them into a seductive narrative.
  Emblematic of this dynamic is Trump Tower, the talisman of privilege that established Donald Trump as a player in New York. Fred Trump’s money helped build it. His son recognized and exploited its iconic power as the primary stage for both “The Apprentice” and his presidential campaign.
• Donald Trump tried to change his ailing father’s will, setting off a family reckoning.

• In December 1990, Donald Trump sent his father a document that left him both angered and alarmed. It was a codicil seeking to make a variety of changes to Fred Trump’s will. Among them: strengthening provisions that made Donald Trump sole executor of his estate. But amid Mr. Trump’s financial shambles — it was the month of the $3.5 million Trump’s Castle rescue — Fred Trump feared that the document potentially put his life’s work at risk, that his son might use the empire as collateral to save his own failing businesses, according to depositions given years later during a family dispute.
• Fred Trump rebuffed the maneuver, refusing to sign the codicil. But the episode prompted a family reckoning: Fred Trump was aging and ailing. Without speedy intervention, he could die leaving a vast estate — not just his real estate empire, but also tens of millions of dollars in cash — vulnerable to the 55 percent inheritance tax.
  So with Donald Trump playing a central role, the family formulated a plan that included unorthodox tax strategies that experts told The Times were legally dubious and, in some cases, appeared to be fraudulent.
• The investigation focuses on All County Building Supply & Maintenance, a Trump company incorporated in 1992. The set-up allowed Fred Trump to make gifts to his children that were made to look like business transactions, thereby avoiding the 55 per cent estate tax at the time. 
• 
• Laundry revenue from apartment buildings
• The Trump parents dodged hundreds of millions in gift taxes by grossly undervaluing the assets they would pass on. 
• Earned $1 million each year from father after graduating college. That ‘small loan’ of $1 million was actually at least $60.7 million — much of it never repaid
• 'Grossly undervalued' property values, avoiding hundreds of millions in taxes during transfers before Fred Trump's death
• 295 revenue streams to Donald Trump:
• An appraisal by Robert Von Ancken put the empire's value at $94 million. But buildings in the same neighborhood sold for considerably more than Van Ancken said Trump's properties were worth.
• In one appraisal that appears to defy normal New York real estate logic, Von Ancken assessed the value of 886 Trump Village apartments on Coney Island as being worth negative $5.9 million.
  But local tax assessors valued them at $38 million, and in 2004, when the real estate market had risen, they were valued at $107 million by a bank. 
• 
• Transfer of eight buildings with 1,032 apartments to his children 
• Trump has refused to release his personal tax returns 
• Efforts to inflate cost of equipment to achieve rent increases.:
  The company spent millions on equipment to maintain Fred Trump's sprawling empire of apartment complexes. Invoices got 'padded,' and Trump's children split the profits. Sometimes invoices were marked up as much as 50 per cent.
  Trump confirms multimillion loss to avoid federal taxes in 2016
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• Got $177 million when Fred Trump's empire was sold off in 2004:
• In 2003, once again in financial trouble, Donald Trump began engineering the sale of the empire Fred Trump had hoped would never leave the family. The sale, completed in 2004, brought him his biggest payday ever from his father: His cut was $177.3 million, or $236.2 million in today’s dollars. But as it turned out, banks at the time valued the empire at hundreds of millions more than the sale price. Donald Trump, master dealmaker, had sold low.