In a terse letter to newly-confirmed Attorney General Merrick Garland, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) is demanding that Garland facilitate “proper oversight” from the Senate into whether the FBI truly investigated sexual assault allegations levied against now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh or whether it conducted a “fake” probe.
Although the Senate has yet to officially announce an investigation, Democrats have had Kavanaugh in their sights since his Senate confirmation hearings in 2018, and Whitehouse clearly believes a Senate probe “into questions about how thoroughly the FBI investigated Kavanaugh” is on the horizon, per Yahoo News
Kavanaugh was, of course, accused of sexually assaulting Dr. Christine Blasey Ford when the pair were teenagers. The FBI was tasked with an emergency investigation into Dr. Ford’s claims, which they completed in just days. The investigation, which involved a number of interviews with both Kavanaugh’s and Dr. Ford’s contemporaries of the time, “multiple committee interviews, over 1,200 questions for the record and over a half-million pages of documents,” according to then-President Donald Trump, produced no evidence of a sexual assault.
The FBI also reportedly looked into claims made by Deborah Ramirez, who told The New Yorker that she was forced to have a sexual interaction with Kavanaugh when the pair were students at Yale Law School in the early 1980s.
“Even before the material was sent to the Senate,” The New York Times noted in 2019, “Democrats complained that the F.B.I. investigation had been too narrow and failed to look extensively enough at the allegations lodged against Judge Kavanaugh, 53, a 12-year veteran of the federal appeals court in Washington.”
Further Democrat inquiries to the FBI produced few results.
Whitehouse says he is “seeking answers as to ‘how, why, and at whose behest’ the FBI conducted a ‘fake’ investigation” and “if standard procedures were violated, including standards for following allegations gathered through FBI ‘tip lines.'” He also wants to know why certain witnesses, who claimed to have credible information about Kavanaugh’s alleged history of sexual assault, were turned away from giving testimony.
“This was unique behavior in my experience, as the Bureau is usually amenable to information and evidence; but in this matter, the shutters were closed, the drawbridge drawn up, and there was no point of entry by which members of the public or Congress could provide information to the FBI,” Whitehouse wrote to Garland Tuesday.
An NBC News report at the time suggests that the FBI did not speak to “20 individuals” who knew either Kavanaugh or Ramirez, “including Kavanaugh’s roommate at the time and a former close Ramirez friend.” It may have been because evidence of the interaction was scanty. The Washington Examiner noted that even mainstream media investigators and two authors who pursued the case full time were unable to find corroboration.
Whitehouse, though, seems to say the FBI, beyond limiting the scope of its investigation, simply ignored credible tips — or rather, ignored tips that Senate Democrats, who viewed them after the FBI’s investigation, believed to be credible.
“This ‘tip line’ appears to have operated more like a garbage chute, with everything that came down the chute consigned without review to the figurative dumpster,” Whitehouse said.
It’s not clear what Whitehouse believes a probe would produce or whether such a probe, even if it produced evidence of a limited FBI investigation, would have any effect on Kavanaugh’s position.