One year later, the Kavanaugh frenzy has returned with a vengeance. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) is now calling for the U.S. Supreme Court justice’s impeachment over the recent New York Times “scoop” alleging that he forced his penis into the hands of a girl at Yale who does not even claim to remember it taking place. MSNBC host Joe Scarborough has now blasted Harris for crossing the line.
“Listen, after the initial hearings that happened a year ago, the number of women, and men, who approached me in public places and cried about what this meant to them because there’s so much about this issue. And I, as a prosecutor, personally prosecuted sexual assault cases and cases of this general nature, and one of the worst things that happens is that when we are not willing to believe the victim and take them seriously,” Harris said on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Monday night.
“Take them seriously. Investigate the case,” she continued. “Determine and assess credibility. But let’s take the allegations seriously. And it’s a very serious allegation. So, you know, I think that, you know, what we have seen, frankly, is we’ve seen suppression of evidence. If the bodies that are charged with actually investigating fail to do it and block it off, or tailor it, I would argue that’s suppression of evidence.”
The California Democrat kicked it up even more, though, when she said that Kavanaugh should now be impeached.
“Yes, I call for impeachment,” she said. “I believe that is the clearest way for us to get an investigation of these allegations and we should open an investigation of these allegations.”
Harris said this despite the fact that the FBI and U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee both extensively investigated the allegations against Kavanaugh and came up with nothing. The supposed new “allegation” that The New York Times revealed over the weekend originated from the justice’s former Yale classmate Max Stier, who claimed he witnessed Kavanaugh’s indecent act of sexual impropriety from decades ago. The woman Stier named, however, had no recollection of the incident, and the Times published the article in the opinion section while giving no mention of that salient fact.
On Tuesday, Scarborough said that Harris should not call for the impeachment of somebody based on such a flimsy allegation. “As a prosecutor, she really should put an ‘alleged’ in front of the word victims, especially in the case of The New York Times essay, the baffling essay, the baffling editing process that they put forward,” he said, as reported by Fox News.
Harris echoed her claims when speaking on NPR’s “Morning Edition” on Tuesday, even going so far as to say that just because an allegation has not been proven, it doesn’t mean that the incident did not happen.
“Someone should investigate this. Because the fact that something has not been proven it doesn’t mean it didn’t occur, right?” said Harris. “But if you don’t investigate it, if it hasn’t been investigated, then there’s not been a full airing of the issue. And my point from the beginning about all of these allegations against Brett Kavanaugh is that there’s not been a robust, a meaningful investigation. There has not been an investigation with the level of attention that normally would occur around these kinds of allegations.”