On Monday’s episode of “The Andrew Klavan Show,” Klavan breaks down the most recent Kavanaugh accusation published by The New York Times and talks about how quickly it fell apart. Video and partial transcript below:
This [New York] Times story is an amazing piece of self-destruction. It’s in keeping with what they’re doing now, everything is get Trump, everything is destroy conservatives, everything is lump conservatives with Trump and just page after page about how Trump is evil, what a terrible thing he’s done to us, how we’ll never recover. Never mind the economy, never mind the fact that we’re not at war, never mind the fact that everything is actually going pretty well.
At The New York Times, Donald Trump is the devil and they cannot stop attacking him, and part of him is, of course, the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. You know, not wishing anything bad on Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but very possibly another Supreme Court pick [is] coming up, so they’re getting all the more hysterical about it.
So a book is going to come out [“The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation”] written by two New York Times reporters. So they run this thing … and you all remember how they tried to get him with Christine Blasey Ford, [saying] he’d done this horrible thing when he was 18- or 17- or 16-years old, whatever it was. Now, [the Times] say they’ve got a shocking new sexual allegation.
When [Kavanaugh] was at Yale in the ’80s, he was at a party, and I guess the idea is he was naked and some of his pals shoved him into a girl so that his penis touched her hand. This is written by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, and we’ll get back to them in a minute. …
Mollie Hemingway and Carrie Severino wrote this wonderful, wonderful book called “Justice On Trial.” I read it, I recommend it highly. It is deeply, deeply researched. All about this attack on Brett Kavanaugh, and where it came from, and the strategies they were using, all this stuff. Here’s Mollie talking about the way the Times reported this allegation:
HEMINGWAY: So there is this book coming out on Tuesday, it’s written by two reporters who were actually kind of involved in anti-Kavanaugh efforts, probably the best way to put it. They were reporting on it for The New York Times, they were pulled off of their beats to help, because they both had privileged backgrounds where they had intersected with people who were in the story, and Robin Pogrebin went to Yale with Kavanaugh, she actually roomed with one of the central figures who coordinated anti- Kavanaugh efforts. She lightly discloses that in her book, and now they’re out with a book — and Carrie [Severino] and I have been reading it, I just finished it. They also have an essay where they claim that there was another allegation. Left out of the essay is … that the claim that was made is actually denied by the alleged victim. They put that in their book, but they didn’t put that in their essay, which is causing some people to question their journalistic ethics.
This is amazing stuff. They did put an editorial note after 24 hours of enduring the wrath of all humankind. They put in an editorial note mentioning that the woman who is supposed to be at the center of this doesn’t remember this. She doesn’t say it happened, she’s not denying it, she just says she doesn’t remember something like that ever happened, which is pretty amazing [to leave that out].
I mean, that is an amazing piece, and you have to remember the big thing, the big take on this, is why didn’t the FBI research this? You have to go back and remember that the whole thing was about delaying the Kavanaugh acceptance, delaying putting him on the Court, so that hopefully something magical would happen — they would find that Trump was actually Vladimir Putin in disguise, you know, they would actually get to an election and vote him out of office — something, anything to delay.
So they kept pouring things on, kept masking more and more things, kept moving the goalpost, and finally, the Republicans agreed to let the FBI investigate the two most believable allegations: The Blasey Ford allegation and one other allegation. They investigated those [and] found no proof that they had taken place. It’s obvious nonsense.
Now here’s Carrie Severino, the other author of the book “Justice On Trial,” talking about the chain, how this piece of intelligence actually becomes a story, [and] how the sources pass it along.
SEVERINO: What’s so funny about this allegation is the incredibly attenuated nature of it. So what they really have is two Senate staffers who say that Stier told them that he heard from a woman at a party — when … everyone was maybe drunk — Kavanaugh’s friends pushed him and his genitalia into her. Now what’s crazy is that this story itself is, I mean if you even followed that, that’s impressive, it’s so many links in the chain. And the part that they leave out is that this woman apparently had told her friend that she doesn’t even remember it [and] Stier himself — and the woman are not speaking to Pogrebin and Kelly. So this is a, you know, it’s not even like third-hand, fourth-hand, account of an incident that, even if it happened as it is described, sounds like it was Kavanaugh’s friends who were the wrongdoers here. So it is a very bizarre thing to try to hang your hat on, as a new allegation.
On top of which, Stier, who they refer to as this kind of … well-respected guy — he runs a nonprofit and … oh, he was a well-respected man — he was also on Bill Clinton’s legal team when they were defending him against charges of sexual malfeasance with Monica Lewinsky. Stier is on that legal team, and on the other team against him: Brett Kavanaugh.
So they’ve got these two reporters, one of whom was involved with trying to take down Kavanaugh. They’ve got a source who isn’t talking to them, who was on the Bill Clinton team against Brett Kavanaugh. Plus, it wasn’t even from the source. It was two people, two aides, telling them that the source said that this happened at a party to a woman who doesn’t remember it. I mean, this is something you scrawl on a bathroom wall — this is not a news story that should make it into some place supposedly as terrific a journalistic venue as The New York Times.
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