New Kavanaugh Book Is a Gift for Conservatives

Brett Kavanaugh at the 2019 State of the Union Address a few months after having been confirmed.Doug Mills/Pool/CNP via ZUMA

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In case you haven’t been following closely, here’s what we’ve learned from the new book about Brett Kavanaugh and the sexual assault charges against him:

  1. Back during Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, Chistine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of pinning her on a bed and covering her mouth—before eventually letting her go—at a small house party when he was 17. In the book, we learn that Leland Keyser, a friend of Ford’s who was at the party, now says that she doesn’t remember the event and that “it just didn’t make sense.” And: “It would be impossible for me to be the only girl at a get-together with three guys, have her leave, and then not figure out how she’s getting home. I just really didn’t have confidence in the story.” Keyser says that her original equivocal testimony had been delivered under duress.
  2. Deborah Ramirez repeated her story of a freshman-year drunken dorm party at Yale during which both she and Kavanaugh were seriously blitzed. Ramiriez says that Kavanaugh pulled down his pants and she swatted his penis away, thinking it was a fake penis the boys had been passing around earlier. Then she learned it had been real, and it’s caused her nightmares ever since. The book lists seven sources who heard about the event, but none of them are actual eyewitnesses.
  3. In a new story, Max Stier says he saw Kavanaugh “with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.” However, the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say she does not recall the episode.
  4. The FBI did a pretty cursory investigation of all this. This, of course, is something we’ve known and complained loudly about from the very start.

It’s not possible to look at all this and conclude that the Kavanaugh sexual assault story has gotten stronger. The main accusation took a hit. The secondary accusation turns out to be fairly slight and there are no actual eyewitnesses to it even after the kind of deep investigation everyone wanted originally. The third accusation may or may not have happened at all. The female student at the center of it has told friends she has no recollection of it.

Fair or not, it is difficult to think that this makes it more likely that Kavanaugh can be impeached. For the most part, this new book is a gift to Trump, not to progressives.

POSTSCRIPT: Just for the record, I maintain my original position that all of these stories are most likely true. Kavanaugh could have simply acknowledged them, apologized, and said he led a wild life for a few years as a teenager. That probably would have made it a two-day story. But he panicked the first time he was asked and instinctively denied everything. From then on, there was no choice but to keep on denying.

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WHO DOESN’T LOVE A POSITIVE STORY—OR TWO?

“Great journalism really does make a difference in this world: it can even save kids.”

That’s what a civil rights lawyer wrote to Julia Lurie, the day after her major investigation into a psychiatric hospital chain that uses foster children as “cash cows” published, letting her know he was using her findings that same day in a hearing to keep a child out of one of the facilities we investigated.

That’s awesome. As is the fact that Julia, who spent a full year reporting this challenging story, promptly heard from a Senate committee that will use her work in their own investigation of Universal Health Services. There’s no doubt her revelations will continue to have a big impact in the months and years to come.

Like another story about Mother Jones’ real-world impact.

This one, a multiyear investigation, published in 2021, exposed conditions in sugar work camps in the Dominican Republic owned by Central Romana—the conglomerate behind brands like C&H and Domino, whose product ends up in our Hershey bars and other sweets. A year ago, the Biden administration banned sugar imports from Central Romana. And just recently, we learned of a previously undisclosed investigation from the Department of Homeland Security, looking into working conditions at Central Romana. How big of a deal is this?

“This could be the first time a corporation would be held criminally liable for forced labor in their own supply chains,” according to a retired special agent we talked to.

Wow.

And it is only because Mother Jones is funded primarily by donations from readers that we can mount ambitious, yearlong—or more—investigations like these two stories that are making waves.

About that: It’s unfathomably hard in the news business right now, and we came up about $28,000 short during our recent fall fundraising campaign. We simply have to make that up soon to avoid falling further behind than can be made up for, or needing to somehow trim $1 million from our budget, like happened last year.

If you can, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones—that exists to make a difference, not a profit—with a donation of any amount today. We need more donations than normal to come in from this specific blurb to help close our funding gap before it gets any bigger.

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