Would everyone be surprised to learn that the Senate’s 2018 investigation into whether Screamin’ SCOTUS Justice Boof Colander – sorry, Brett Kavanaugh – ever tried to stick his penis into women’s faces and other places where it was not invited was something of a sham?
You wouldn’t? Congrats, you are a sentient human being in America.
The Guardian has come into possession of evidence of how the Senate disproved one particular claim that arose during Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. Or more accurately, the paper has evidence that the Senate did not debunk the claim so much as they just wished it into the cornfield.
You’ll recall that one of the accusations leveled at Kavanaugh in the fall of 2018 came from a Yale classmate named Deborah Ramirez, who claimed that during a college party, the future Supreme Court justice pulled out his dick and tried to shove it into her face, presumably because why not, people have relationships after meeting in all sorts of weird ways.
But the then-Republican-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee’s report about Kavanaugh’s alleged peccadilloes decided with no evidence whatsoever that the future justice was the victim of a case of mistaken identity, and that someone else must have been the person who tried to dick-slap Ramirez. Then they confirmed him and he helped end legal abortion in America, the end.
It turns out that the conclusion that Ramirez was mistaken came from a letter sent to the committee in the name of Joseph C. Smith Jr., who had attended Yale at the same time as Ramirez and Kavanaugh. In the letter, Smith accused a different Yale student, a man by the name of Jack Maxey, of being the culprit, because Maxey had a “reputation” of exposing himself at parties and surely there could not be two boorish male undergrads at Yale who might have drunkenly taken out their wieners at a party in the 1980s.
There was a slight flaw to this accusation, though, which is that Jack Maxey was not actually a student at Yale at the time the Ramirez incident occurred:
In an interview with the Guardian, Maxey confirmed that he was still a senior in high school at the time of the alleged incident, and said he had never been contacted by any of the Republican staffers who were conducting the investigation.“I was not at Yale,” he said. “I was a senior in high school at the time. I was not in New Haven.” He added: “These people can say what they want, and there are no consequences, ever.”
Ah. So the investigators on the commission had this accusation and never actually questioned the accused. They just figured that some rando lawyer in Denver said he probably did it, and that was good enough for them! Case closed!
Also there was this:
While Maxey seemed in his interview with the Guardian to have been annoyed that Smith — whom he said he didn’t know or recall interacting with — named him in an accusatory email, he also separately defended Kavanaugh, who he said had behaved like a “choir boy” while attending Yale.
Yes, the irony here is that Maxey is a conservative nutter. He was a Steve Bannon disciple who got a copy of the hard drive of Hunter Biden’s laptop from Rudy Giuliani and helped send it around to Republican members of Congress. He had as vested an interest as any other wingnut in Kavanaugh’s ascension to the Court.
There is also no evidence that Joseph Smith had any sort of relationship with Kavanaugh. They were both students at Yale at the same time and they both worked on George W. Bush’s recount court cases in Florida after the 2000 election. And being members of the Federalist Society, maybe they had crossed paths at some point at a convention or a bloodletting or whatever the Federalist Society gets up to when its minions gather.
But the bottom line here seems to be that a conservative lawyer in Denver, either on his own or at someone’s behest, sent an allegation to the lead counsel at the Senate Judiciary Committee, an allegation that he had no knowledge of beyond maybe having heard it as a piece of gossip somewhere. And that allegation made it into the Judiciary Committee’s conclusions about the Kavanaugh case despite the fact that no one appears to have spoken to Jack Maxey or even investigated the story at all.
Anyway, just one more story to keep in mind the next time conservatives complain that Democrats are delegitimizing the Supreme Court.
