New Kavanaugh Revelations: Why the Supreme Court is Broken

Two corrupt sexual predators.

Over the weekend, new revelations about past sexual improprieties by Bret Kavanaugh were reported by the New York Times.  Just as disturbingly, the coverage also indicated that the FBI seemingly deliberately failed to follow up on credible sources that would have corroborated allegations against Kavanaugh. One can well imagine where that directive came from.  The overall picture is one of utter corruption on the part of Senate Republicans who sought to ram Kavanaugh's nomination through no matter what.  The second conclusion is that a sitting justice of the Supreme Court is unfit to hold that position.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the corrupt Republican agenda - Senator Susan Collins seeming was a willing part of it - and the institutional damage being done to the Court and to constitutional government.  Here are column excerpts:

We focus, rightly, on the damage President Trump is doing to our institutions. But the wreckage goes beyond Trump and involves the other two branches of government as well. The right wing’s determination to control the Supreme Court is undermining its legitimacy as well as confidence in the U.S. Senate’s approach to confirming nominees.

For the GOP, nothing will be allowed to derail its effort to create a generation-long conservative majority on the court. And that helps to explain why Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh was railroaded through his confirmation hearings last year after what amounted to a pretend inquiry into the various charges against him.

The costs of this approach were underscored this weekend by a New York Times report that offers new corroboration for charges by Deborah Ramirez that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her when both were undergraduates at Yale. In denying the charge, Kavanaugh told the Senate that had it been true, the incident would have been “the talk of the campus.” Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly — drawing on their new book, “The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation” — write tellingly: “Our reporting suggests that it was.”

More than that, they report on an entirely separate incident involving Kavanaugh that Max Stier, a classmate of Ramirez’s, brought to the attention of the Senate and the FBI at the time of the hearings. It involved, they write, “a different drunken dorm party” where, according to the allegation, Kavanaugh had a different inappropriate encounter with a female student. Stier is president of the thoroughly bipartisan and widely respected Partnership for Public Service. From my experience, he is the last person who would want to get into the middle of an ideological fight — unless his conscience required him to.

Ramirez’s legal team gave the FBI a list of “at least 25 individuals who may have had corroborating evidence” of her story. The bureau, the authors report, “interviewed none of them.” Nor did the FBI look into Stier’s account.

Now let’s take a step back: If Senate Republicans had declared Kavanaugh’s behavior as a high school and college student off-limits, they would have risked a firestorm, but at least they would have been honest about what they were up to.

However, they could not take this route once they agreed to hear psychology professor Christine Blasey Ford’s four hours of testimony about her charge that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in the early 1980s when both were in high school. Ford’s testimony was so credible — Republican after Republican praised her — that the GOP was forced to agree to a brief FBI investigation.

But it was such a sharply constrained investigation that neither Kavanaugh nor Ford was questioned, and the other allegations against Kavanaugh were ignored. “The process was a sham,” Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), a member of the Judiciary Committee who is seeking her party’s presidential nomination, said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” She was not being hyperbolic. In the wake of the new revelations, three other Democratic contenders quickly called for Kavanaugh’s impeachment.

This leaves it to journalists to keep exploring questions the Senate refused to settle. And it leaves the court and the country in a terrible place.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had already signaled that court packing took priority over due process . . . . The administration seems eager to flaunt the right’s new judicial power. . . . And the administration is developing the habit of skipping the normal appeals process to advance cases to a Supreme Court it has shaped to its liking. This drew a sharp rebuke from Justice Sonia Sotomayor in her dissent last week when the court overturned a lower court’s national injunction against the administration’s asylum policy. She said colleagues’ “precipitous” ruling “sidesteps the ordinary judicial process to allow the Government to implement a rule that bypassed the ordinary rulemaking ­process.”

It was Kavanaugh who said in his opening statement to the Judiciary Committee at his 2018 hearing: “The Supreme Court must never, never be viewed as a partisan institution.” But it’s impossible not to view the court in exactly that way, thanks to a GOP determined to control it by any means at its disposal. It’s why questions — about Kavanaugh and the court itself — will continue to haunt us.

What Does the FBI Know?

With most of the news media distracted by the air strikes against Syria - just as Trump and his inner circle wanted - some in the media continue to keep their eye on what should be the real target and most important story/question of all:  did Trump and his campaign collude with Russia to throw the 2016 presidential election to Trump?  Trump's air strikes did no lasting damage it Bashar Assad's ability to make war against his own citizens.  Indeed, the runways at the targeted airfield were not destroyed. Syrian losses were small - not that lost lives mean anything to Assad, Vladimir Putin or, I suspect Trump.  The three men have one thing in common: the only thing that matters to them is themselves.  No one else matters.  No one. Given these realities, a piece in Talking Points Memo looks at a key issue that remains unanswered: what does the FBI know and why was it so slow in taking up the investigation of Trump and his henchmen.  Here are article highlights:

There's quite a lot of news today in the news world. But I wanted to focus briefly on a story in The New York Times last evening about what the US government knew and/or believed about Russian election interference operations last summer and fall.

These two paragraphs are the most noteworthy in the piece (emphasis added) ...

In an Aug. 25 briefing for Harry Reid, then the top Democrat in the Senate, Mr. Brennan indicated that Russia’s hackings appeared aimed at helping Mr. Trump win the November election, according to two former officials with knowledge of the briefing.

The officials said Mr. Brennan also indicated that unnamed advisers to Mr. Trump might be working with the Russians to interfere in the election. The F.B.I. and two congressional committees are now investigating that claim, focusing on possible communications and financial dealings between Russian affiliates and a handful of former advisers to Mr. Trump. So far, no proof of collusion has emerged publicly.

The key here is that the CIA had decided much earlier than heretofore reported that Russia was working to elect Donald Trump President and at least had serious suspicions that members of Trump's team were collaborating with the Russians in that effort.

The story also provides greater background on the disagreements between the FBI and the CIA and questions about the FBI's own actions. Indeed, it is only now that can fully contextualize former Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid's fury in the letter he sent to FBI Director James Comey on October 31st, 2016, after Comey himself publicly re-injected the Clinton emails story into the campaign.

We have known for months that it took the FBI much longer than the CIA to decide that Russia was likely working to elect Donald Trump rather than simply sowing chaos in the US political process. This has always struck me as an odd reticence purely just on logical principles. If all your disruption is aimed at 'disrupting' the campaign of one candidate, in the zero sum logic of binary elections, you're probably trying to help the other candidate. However that may be, as Brennan apparently made clear to Reid and the seven other congressional leader, the FBI had to take the lead on getting to the bottom of questions about collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. Because only the FBI is permitted to mount investigations in the US and focused on American nationals. Reid knew the intelligence community had these concerns for months. But the FBI seemed conspicuously slow to address them. Comey chose to send that highly damaging letter about Secretary Clinton, which proved to be based on nothing, only days before the election while this investigation remained entirely out of public view. Reid's fury, expressed in his letter to Comey, is quite understandable.

What Reid didn't know when he first raised his concerns with Comey in August was that the FBI had actually launched its own counter-intelligence investigation a month earlier, in late July,

This kind of foreign interference in a US presidential campaign is essentially unprecedented - its actual impact, then and now, is unclear. Meanwhile, public discussion of the fact that a key foreign adversary was trying to help one major party candidate get elected would itself be a political bombshell - something the incumbent President, the Republican opposition and the intelligence bureaucracies would each for their own very different reasons be very wary of.

All this said, it appears that the FBI was the least aggressive of the relevant agencies, both in its investigations and its conclusions about Russian motives. The nature, aggressiveness and findings of the FBI's investigation - which again, began in late July - remain largely a black box. How aggressive was it? We simply do not know.

What we do know is that at least a decade ago the FBI (and likely the CIA as well) knew a great about Donald Trump's business ties to the Russian and former Soviet Union criminal underworld. How did that knowledge figure into the investigation or any sluggishness to that probe? . . . these are matters of the most profound public import. These are questions the public needs, will need, answers to.

We need to not allow ourselves to be distracted by Syrian airstrikes and posturing (which may have been engineered by Trump, Putin and Assad) or anything else Trump and his regime throw out to distract the public and the media.  More than anything else, we need to know whether a traitor occupies the White House. 

Is the FBI Hiding Information on Trump's Possible Ties to Russia?

On Friday FBI Director James Comey took it upon himself to release a letter fanning new flames into the Republican witch hunt over Hillary Clinton's e-mails.  In doing so, Comey seemingly violated federal law as well as long standing policies and procedures.  In fact, Richard Painter, the chief White House Ethics Lawyer in the Bush Administration from 2005-2007, was so outraged that he filed a Complaint against Comey with the Office Of Special Counsel and the Office of Government Ethics. In particular, Painter explains why Comey’s inexplicable actions this week may warrant prosecution for abuse of power under the Hatch Act.  Senate Minority Leader, Harry Reid has echoed Painter's concerns.   More significantly, Reid also made clear that the FBI has been sitting on information that suggests that Donald Trump may be involved in solicitations from Vladimir Putin and the Russian Government.  The Washington Post has details on both of Reid's statements.  Adding concern to Reid's statements is an article in Mother Jones that indicated that the FBI has credible evidence on a possible Russian intelligence attempt to develop a secret relationship with Trump and/or cultivate him as an asset.  Despite the seriousness of these allegations, Comey has remained utterly silent.   Sloppy usage of e-mail warrants an announcement to the public in Comey's world view, possible covert operations by Trump and/or his advisers doesn't.  Here are highlights from the Washington Post (some from Mother Jones will follow):

In a letter to FBI Director James B. Comey on Sunday night, outgoing Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) says Comey may have broken the law.

And that's not even the most brazen claim in the letter — not by a long shot.

In the course of arguing that Comey's disclosure that the FBI is looking into new Hillary Clinton investigation emails may have violated the Hatch Act, Reid slips in an extremely bold claim about the Trump campaign and the Russian government.

In my communications with you and other top officials in the national security community, it has become clear that you possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisors, and the Russian government — a foreign interest openly hostile to the United States, which Trump praises at every opportunity. The public has a right to know this information. I wrote to you months ago calling for this information to be released to the public. There is no danger to American interests from releasing it. And yet, you continue to resist calls to inform the public of this critical information.

Reid is saying that he has been told the FBI has evidence of possible collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. And he's not just saying this information came from mysterious and unnamed national security officials; he's saying Comey himself has left him with this impression.

Yes, Reid can be a loose canon on occasion.  But this time, he may be directly on target.  Here are highlights from Mother Jones that look very damning to Trump, some of his inner circle, and, of course, Comey:

Reid's missive set off a burst of speculation on Twitter and elsewhere. What was he referring to regarding the Republican presidential nominee? At the end of August, Reid had written to Comey and demanded an investigation of the "connections between the Russian government and Donald Trump's presidential campaign," and in that letter he indirectly referred to Carter Page, an American businessman cited by Trump as one of his foreign policy advisers, who had financial ties to Russia and had recently visited Moscow. Last month, Yahoo News reported that US intelligence officials were probing the links between Page and senior Russian officials. 

On Monday, NBC News reported that the FBI has mounted a preliminary inquiry into the foreign business ties of Paul Manafort, Trump's former campaign chief. But Reid's recent note hinted at more than the Page or Manafort affairs. And a former senior intelligence officer for a Western country who specialized in Russian counterintelligence tells Mother Jonesthat in recent months he provided the bureau with memos, based on his recent interactions with Russian sources, contending the Russian government has for years tried to co-opt and assist Trump—and that the FBI requested more information from him.

An FBI spokeswoman says, "Normally, we don't talk about whether we are investigating anything." But a senior US government official not involved in this case but familiar with the former spy tells Mother Jones that he has been a credible source with a proven record of providing reliable, sensitive, and important information to the US government.
In June, the former Western intelligence officer—who spent almost two decades on Russian intelligence matters and who now works with a US firm that gathers information on Russia for corporate clients—was assigned the task of researching Trump's dealings in Russia and elsewhere, according to the former spy and his associates in this American firm. This was for an opposition research project originally financed by a Republican client critical of the celebrity mogul.

[W]hen he dug into Trump, he notes, he came across troubling information indicating connections between Trump and the Russian government. According to his sources, he says, "there was an established exchange of information between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin of mutual benefit."

This was, the former spy remarks, "an extraordinary situation." He regularly consults with US government agencies on Russian matters, and near the start of July on his own initiative—without the permission of the US company that hired him—he sent a report he had written for that firm to a contact at the FBI, according to the former intelligence officer and his American associates, who asked not to be identified. (He declines to identify the FBI contact.) The former spy says he concluded that the information he had collected on Trump was "sufficiently serious" to share with the FBI.

Mother Jones has reviewed that report and other memos this former spy wrote. The first memo, based on the former intelligence officer's conversations with Russian sources, noted, "Russian regime has been cultivating, supporting and assisting TRUMP for at least 5 years. Aim, endorsed by PUTIN, has been to encourage splits and divisions in western alliance." It maintained that Trump "and his inner circle have accepted a regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin, including on his Democratic and other political rivals." It claimed that Russian intelligence had "compromised" Trump during his visits to Moscow and could "blackmail him."

[I]n August, they say, the FBI asked him for all information in his possession and for him to explain how the material had been gathered and to identify his sources. The former spy forwarded to the bureau several memos—some of which referred to members of Trump's inner circle. After that point, he continued to share information with the FBI. "It's quite clear there was or is a pretty substantial inquiry going on," he says.

"This is something of huge significance, way above party politics," the former intelligence officer comments. "I think [Trump's] own party should be aware of this stuff as well."

According to several national security experts, there is widespread concern in the US intelligence community that Russian intelligence, via hacks, is aiming to undermine the presidential election—to embarrass the United States and delegitimize its democratic elections. And the hacks appear to have been designed to benefit Trump. 

In the letter Reid sent to Comey on Sunday, he pointed out that months ago he had asked the FBI director to release information on Trump's possible Russia ties. Since then, according to a Reid spokesman, Reid has been briefed several times. The spokesman adds, "He is confident that he knows enough to be extremely alarmed."

I suspect that some of my Republican friends supporting Trump will merely scoff, but perhaps they should invest in a Rosetta Stone language course and brush up on Russian. Some of these same people scoffed when I predicted in 2003 that the Iraq War would be a disaster and unleash unanticipated consequences - consequences we are still plagued by today.  Should Trump win the White House, I predict that America will experience an unmitigated disaster.