Cruising the Web

Well, we can be sure that the FBI report didn’t have anything in it that was damaging to Kavanaugh. If there had been, it would have leaked already. Instead, the Democrats are all whining that it didn’t go far enough. They are complaining that Dr. Ford wasn’t interviewed. Well, why would she need to be? She testified for hours just last week. They had their opportunity to question her. She was asked if she had anything else to say and she declined. If she had something to add, she could issue a statement with what she wants to get out there. She proved perfectly capable of doing so when she first sent her information to the Washington Post and then when she allowed them to publish her name and gave them access to her therapist’s notes. She wanted them to interview her friends that she told her story to this summer. That is not corroboration of her original story. If these were people that she told contemporaneously, it would be a different story, but that she told friends this year her story is no corroboration of anything.
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THe same Democrats who were telling us a week ago that it would only take a week or less for the FBI to conduct an investigation are now demanding more time. Gee, who could have predicted that?

It may well be, as John McCormack argues, that the week delay actually served to help Kavanaugh. The FBI investigation didn’t turn up anything damaging so that all the Democrats have to complain about is that they didn’t interview Ford. We know that they’d have been happy to insinuate that there was dirt there if there was anything. Instead, they interviewed the possible witnesses that Ford herself named as well as some of his friends who were at the July 1st party that some on the left were pinpointing as the possible day when this party could have happened.

Republicans were afraid that the extra week would just provide more time for more accusations to come out against Kavanaugh. Instead, those accusations that were out there have collapsed. Take the accusations from Michael Avenatti’s client Julie Swetnick that Kavanaugh and his friends were serial gang rapists.

The wild accusation of gang rape was implausible from the beginning but was taken seriously by Senate Democrats and many in the mainstream media. As we noted hours after Swetnick’s claim first appeared on September 26: “If what Swetnick alleges is true—that there were ‘many’ parties at which ‘boys lined up’ outside of rooms to commit ‘gang rape’—then there must exist many victims, many perpetrators, and many witnesses.” The Wall Street Journal reported on September 29: “The Wall Street Journal has attempted to corroborate Ms. Swetnick’s account, contacting dozens of former classmates and colleagues, but could not reach anyone with knowledge of her allegations.” Swetnick told NBC on October 1, that “everybody in the county remembers those parties,” and she gave the names of four people to NBC: One was deceased, one said he didn’t know a Julie Swetnick, and two did not reply.

In that same interview Swetnick backtracked on several key allegations in her sworn declaration. You really have to watch Swetnick’s entire October 1 NBC interview to see how Swetnick’s already implausible claims against Kavanaugh have totally collapsed.

It was ridiculously implausible from the beginning, but some Democratic senators referred to it in the hearing last week. Senator Feinstein was one of them. And then they wonder why Brett Kavanaugh would be so angry that U.S. Senators were giving credence to bizarre, uncorroborated allegations of gang rape.

Then there is the other allegation from Deborah Ramirez that Kavanaugh waved his wingwang in her face at a Yale party. The story in the New Yorker was so weak with no corroboration and Ramirez saying herself that she wasn’t sure it was Kavanaugh until she spent six days this year talking to a Democratic politician/lawyer to assess her memories. She contacted friends asking them if they remembered that Kavanaugh had done this and none of them supported her.

Now, the New Yorker has published a follow-up on their original story that is really shameful journalism. It turns out that the one anonymous source in the first story who told them that he had heard a rumor of such a party at the time. The hook for yesterday’s story by Jane Mayer and Ronan Farrow was that the FBI wasn’t interviewing this “witness.” But then they tell us that the witness is now willing to go public except he doesn’t have anything to add except his vague memory of hearing that rumor.

Appold said that he initially asked to remain anonymous because he hoped to make contact first with the classmate who, to the best of his recollection, told him about the party and was an eyewitness to the incident. He said that he had not been able to get any response from that person, despite multiple attempts to do so. The New Yorker reached the classmate, but he said that he had no memory of the incident.

So that’s what the New Yorker now has – a guy who said another guy told him this story but that second guy doesn’t have any memory of that. Why would the New Yorker go to press with such a flimsy nothingburger? They shouldn’t have published their first story that the victim herself hadn’t been sure of and with the only corroboration being a rumor that some guy had heard. But now they’ve doubled down with this report that totally refutes the basis for their original story. WHy would the FBI interview this guy?

And they’re upset that the FBI wasn’t investigating tales of Kavanaugh’s drinking in college. Well, there wasn’t all this brouhaha because he was accused of excessive drinking, but because he was accused of sexual assault. When those allegations seemed to fall apart because none of her witnesses corroborated her tale, the left swiftly changed to making the accusations about drinking because they wanted to prove that he had perjured himself that he had never blacked out while drunk thus raising the possibility that he didn’t remember this party because he’d blacked out. But they still have the problem that no other witness remembers this party and Ford’s own friend, Leland Keyser, didn’t remember it.

By the way, Keyser is reportedly rather ticked off that Ford threw her under the bus by giving her name without any heads up and during the hearing implied that her health was so bad which explained why she couldn’t remember this party.

Christine Ford’s high school friend, Leland Keyser, was ‘completely blindsided’ and left ‘reeling’ when the woman accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of attempted rape named her as a corroborating witness.

Speaking exclusively to DailyMailTV a family member close to Keyser, 52, said: ‘Christine didn’t give her so much as a heads up – as far as I know they haven’t really spoken for several years and they’re certainly not close anymore….

‘It really felt a lot like Christine was the one called to the principal’s office to give an account of something and just threw her under the bus. You know, just reached for a name.’

Keyser’s attorney, Howard J Walsh III, last night confirmed that his client has spoken with the FBI and that when she did so she could not corroborate Ford’s account.

Instead she doubled down on the statements she has already given to the Senate Committee in which she has denied all knowledge of the supposed party, the alleged assault or of Kavanaugh, 53….

Keyser – whom Ford described as her ‘best friend’ at Holton-Arms preparatory school – was her final hope for corroboration.

But Keyser’s relative revealed the mother-of-two’s shock at being named as a witness by a woman to whom she has barely spoken in recent years.

And they expressed anger at Ford’s suggestion that Keyser could not recall the party because of the ‘significant health challenges’ she has faced in recent years.

Ford attempted to brush aside Keyser’s statement telling members of the Senate Committee: ‘Leland has significant health challenges, and I’m happy that she’s focusing on herself and getting the health treatment that she needs, and she let me know that she needed her lawyer to take care of this for her, and she texted me right afterward with an apology and good wishes, and et cetera.

‘So I’m glad that she’s taking care of herself….

Speaking in her defense Keyser’s loved one noted: ‘I think it’s quite convenient that she named the person who is frankly probably the least physically capable of all of them to stand up and be subjected to questioning or give her account.’

The family member went on to explain that the ‘health challenges’ faced by Keyser have not impaired her memory.

But they admitted that being caught up in the Kavanaugh scandal has proved physically trying at a time when Keyser is not in good health.

The relative said: ‘Leland is not a well woman. She has had years of injuries that have seen her have 14 operations on her neck and back. She just wants to get better.’

She is also under enormous emotional stress.

An open letter to Keyser published on Tuesday in The Daily Caller dragged up a tragedy from her past in a bizarre attempt to cast doubt on Keyser’s insistence that she remembers nothing and push her to confront past memories, however painful.

The letter, written by Sara Corcoran, publisher of National Courts Monitor who knew Keyser in her youth, recalled the day in July 1988 when Keyser’s boyfriend dived into the shallow end of the swimming pool at Columbia Country Club. He broke his neck and died.

Corcoran wrote: ‘I remember how you suffered…. sometimes it seems like it is easier to remain silent, but I also feel you know where the house was and who was there.’

She stated: ‘There was nothing you could have done to save Bill from the fate that awaited him, but you can save Christine.’

I can see how all this might annoy someone. And maybe she’s realized the implication of the story that Ford is telling about this party. According to Ford’s version, she escaped her attempted rapists and ran out of the house and somehow got home and never spoke about this party again until couples therapy in 2012. Well, if her story was true, that meant that she left her best friend, Keyser, alone in the house with a couple of rapists and then never asked her the next day if she had herself gotten home safely. Some friend, eh?

When all the other allegations fell apart, the left seized on other strained reading of the yearbook and Kavanaugh’s testimony to claim that he perjured himself. There were all sorts of experts on the “boof” truthers who cropped up on the internet to assert quite assuredly that “boof” referred to sex and not flatulence. Because you know, the Urban Dictionary says so and slang terms among teen boys never changes meaning 36 years later. But that had fallen apart as an LA Times writer, Del Quentin Wilber wrote that a decade after that yearbook entry, students at Georgetown Prep were still using boofing to mean farting. And Wilber also rejects the idea that Devil’s Triangle, which Kavanaugh had said was a drinking game, was actually about a sexual threesome.

Graduates of the early 1980s also told me Devil’s Triangle was a drinking game. It involved three cups of beer and bouncing quarters into them. Prep students played a lot of quarters. A bunch of ’83 [grads] mention Devil’s Triangle on their yearbook pages, and I find it hard to believe that students at an all boys high school of that era would be referring to the sex act as defined by urban dictionary. Too much stigma.

Georgetown Prep alumni wrote a letter to the Judiciary Committee to establish that, yes, Devil’s Triangle was a drinking game.

“‘Devil’s Triangle’ was a drinking game we came up with in high school. It was a variation on the game ‘Quarters.’ When we played ‘Devil’s Triangle,’ four people sat at a table. On the table, three small glasses of beer were arranged next to one another to form a triangle. Each of the four participants took turns being the ‘shooter.’ The shooter attempted to bounce a quarter into one of the glasses,” wrote the alumni.

“We do not remember the exact origin of the name, but none of us used the phrase ‘Devil’s Triangle’ in our yearbook to refer to any kind of sexual activity. To us, it was just a game with glasses in the shape of a triangle. If the phrase ‘Devil’s Triangle’ had any sexual meaning in the early 1980s, we did not know it,” the letter concludes.

And yes, one day, future generations will look back at this time in disbelief that we spent a week discussing boofing and the Devil’s Triangle because somehow Democrats felt that a high school yearbook made a difference to the confirmation of a Supreme Court justice.

Last night Brett Kavanaugh published an essay in the Wall Street Journal to try to explain away his passion in the hearing. He asserts that he has a 12-year record of dispassionate ruling on the D. C. Circuit.

As Justice Kennedy has stated, judges do not make decisions to reach a preferred result. Judges make decisions because the law and the Constitution compel the result. Over the past 12 years, I have ruled sometimes for the prosecution and sometimes for criminal defendants, sometimes for workers and sometimes for businesses, sometimes for environmentalists and sometimes for coal miners. In each case, I have followed the law. I do not decide cases based on personal or policy preferences. I am not a pro-plaintiff or pro-defendant judge. I am not a pro-prosecution or pro-defense judge. I am a pro-law judge.

He reaffirms his commitment to rule that way if he were to be confirmed. There is no allegation that he hadn’t had a judicial temperament as a judge. He certainly didn’t display any anger in his original hearings even though the Democrats spent that time blasting him. And just about all the Democrats on that panel had already announced that they opposed him. Cory Booker had said that anyone who voted for him would be “complicit with evil.” But he answered those questions patiently and calmly. But, as anyone with any brains at all could tell, his demeanor was different at last week’s hearing because he was being accused of terrible behavior.

I was very emotional last Thursday, more so than I have ever been. I might have been too emotional at times. I know that my tone was sharp, and I said a few things I should not have said. I hope everyone can understand that I was there as a son, husband and dad. I testified with five people foremost in my mind: my mom, my dad, my wife, and most of all my daughters.

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: hardworking, even-keeled, open-minded, independent and dedicated to the Constitution and the public good. As a judge, I have always treated colleagues and litigants with the utmost respect. I have been known for my courtesy on and off the bench. I have not changed. I will continue to be the same kind of judge I have been for the last 12 years. And I will continue to contribute to our country as a coach, volunteer, and teacher. Every day I will try to be the best husband, dad, and friend I can be. I will remain optimistic, on the sunrise side of the mountain. I will continue to see the day that is coming, not the day that is gone.

I revere the Constitution. I believe that an independent and impartial judiciary is essential to our constitutional republic. If confirmed by the Senate to serve on the Supreme Court, I will keep an open mind in every case and always strive to preserve the Constitution of the United States and the American rule of law.

I wonder what led him to publish that letter in the WSJ. Did he feel he needed to make that statement because he truly felt bad or to assuage concerns of Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski?

They used to talk about how Robert Byrd was a master of Senate rules. Well, there’s a new master in town – Mitch McConnell. Chad Pergram looks at how McConnell has been manipulating Senate rules to continue doing business such as passing bills on the FAA and on hte opiod crisis while still progressing on cloture on the Kavanaugh nomination. It’s all so byzantine with rules I’ve never heard of and have to read through a couple of times to figure out what is going on. Apparently, it makes a difference whether or not he adjourns or recesses the Senate.

The maneuvers by McConnell may not mean much to the casual observer. But recessing the Senate, rather than adjourning the Senate helps McConnell smooth the path as much as he can on the Kavanaugh nomination.

When the Senate meets each day, it addresses a docket of quotidian administrative issues. The list includes the introduction of bills, reports from committees, messages from the House, approval of the Journal, you name it. The Senate usually agrees to these items in a rote, mechanical fashion. But when things are as supercharged as they are now with Kavanaugh, menial, daily tasks are packed with the potential for mischief for Democrats to attempt to sidetrack the nomination.

So, by not adjourning the Senate for days, McConnell doesn’t have to wrestle with possible dilatory tactics from the Democrats.

The Senate considers Supreme Court nominations on what’s called the “executive” calendar. Senators address garden variety bills on the “legislative” calendar. However, McConnell must obtain the agreement of all 100 senators (called securing “unanimous consent’) to go back and forth between executive and legislative session

Recessing the Senate simply obviates the need to dip in and out of executive session and legislative session. If McConnell toggled back and forth between the two, there’s a chance the Senate could get caught in legislative session. Democrats could try to block McConnell and impede the GOP from returning to executive session to deal with Kavanaugh.

And then there are the Senate rules determining the calendar for the vote on Kavanaugh.

So, at 9:54 p.m. ET Wednesday, McConnell filed a “cloture petition” to halt debate on the Kavanaugh nomination.

By rule, a cloture petition must lay over untouched for an entire day before it “ripens” and is ready for a procedural vote. By filing before midnight, McConnell got the petition in under the wire. Thursday serves as the “layover” day for the cloture petition.

Senate rules also provide for the Senate to vote on cloture one hour after the Senate meets. If the Senate really tries to maximize its time, senators could start the Senate day at 12:01 am et on Friday. Thus, the cloture petition to draw debate to a close would “ripen” at 1:01 am et Friday and be available for a procedural vote. This requires 51 votes. If the Senate votes to “invoke cloture” or limit debate, opponents of the nomination then get 30 hours to run out the string. But only 30 hours. That’s it.

So expect a vote some time on Saturday. Though one kicker could be that Republican Senator Daines of Montana is scheduled to be at his daughter’s wedding on Saturday back in Montana. So, if the Republicans need his vote, they’ll have to change the timing of the vote since he’s already stated that he will not miss walking his daughter down the aisle.

Got that? Sheesh, and that’s the world’s greatest deliberative body.

The irony is how the Democrats brought this on themselves. They filibustered Neil Gorsuch and that angered enough Republicans that McConnell was able to push through an end to the filibuster of Supreme Court nominees. Some at the time thought the Democrats were making a mistake to do this for Gorsuch and that they should hold their fire in case one of the more liberal justices retired. Well, they couldn’t stop themselves and the filibuster is now gone.

Think of this counter-history. If they’d allowed a vote and not filibustered Gorsuch, the Senate would still have it today. Do you think that, in this atmosphere, the Republicans could agree on getting rid of the filibuster? They’re coming down to the last moment in getting the votes for Kavanaugh. No way those wavering Republicans would have voted to end the filibuster today. In fact, Trump would probably have had to nominate someone more moderate in hopes of winning nine Democratic votes.

The Democrats brought this all on themselves. May they glory in the results they ushered in.

The police have tracked down and arrested the man they accuse of doxxing Republican senators during the Kavanaugh hearings by putting their personal information up on Wikipedia. The guy was dumb enough to do it from a Senate computer in Senator Hassan of New Hampshire’s office and was seen by another employee.

According to a sworn statement by Capitol Police Captain Jason Bell, a witness Tuesday saw Cosko at a computer in a senator’s office, where he used to work, a day after two other unnamed senators’ information had been put on Wikipedia. Cosko worked for other Democratic senators including Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Sen. Maggie Hassan, D-N.H., and former Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif. While earlier reports identified Cosko as an intern for Jackson Lee, his lawyer said that he was working as a fellow in her office, paid by an outside institution.

Sources familiar with the case tell Fox News Cosko was in Sen. Hassan’s office, where he was not authorized to be and was caught using a login he was not authorized to use.

The police also say that he threatened to release even more information if that witness told anyone.

According to Bell’s statement, Cosko is alleged to have been confronted by the staffer and then walked out. The staffer then called police. Hours later the witness received an email from “[email protected]” saying: “If you tell anyone I will leak it all. Emails signal conversations gmails. Senators children’s health information and socials.”

“Socials” apparently referred to social security numbers, while Signal is a secure messaging application. Bell said that there was probably cause to believe that Cosko published the information of senators, and then made threatening statements directed to the unnamed witness “with the intent to hinder, delay, or prevent” the witness from reporting it to authorities.

Charming. In this environment who knows what some crazy person would do with that information. At the very least they could harass a senator’s family in their homes. I’m not sure how some Senate aide would have access to the health information of Senators’ children, but that is a scary threat. Throw the book at him.

As an indication o the way that people are regularly threatening Republicans, read this open letter from Rand Paul’s wife addressed to Cory Booker. She talks about the threat that she feels at home and reminds him that her husband was at the congressional baseball practice shot up by a crazed gunman and was also attacked by his neighbor breaking six ribs and damaging his lungs. But the assault on her husband apparently amuses Democrats.

Kentucky’s secretary of state, Alison Lundergan Grimes, recently joked about it in a speech. MSNBC commentator Kasie Hunt laughingly said on air that Rand’s assault was one of her “favorite stories.” Cher, Bette Midler, and others have lauded his attacker on Twitter. I hope that these women never have to watch someone they love struggle to move or even breathe for months on end.

Earlier this week, Rand was besieged in the airport by activists “getting up in his face,” as you, Senator Booker, encouraged them to do a few months ago. Preventing someone from moving forward, thrusting your middle finger in their face, screaming vitriol — is this the way to express concern or enact change? Or does it only incite unstable people to violence, making them feel that assaulting a person is somehow politically justifiable?

Senator Booker, Rand has worked with you to co-sponsor criminal justice reform bills. He respects you, and so do I. I would call on you to retract your statement. I would call on you to condemn violence, the leaking of elected officials’ personal addresses (our address was leaked from a Senate directory given only to senators), and the intimidation and threats that are being hurled at them and their families.