President Trump has directed the FBI to conduct a supplemental background investigation to determine if Supreme Court Justice nominee Brett Kavanaugh had any relevant involvement in the allegations raised by Christine Ford and Deborah Ramirez.  President Trump further directed the FBI to conclude its supplemental investigations by next Friday, October 5.

I predict:   Between November 28 and October 5, Christine Ford and her attorneys will try to file a criminal complaint against Brett Kavanaugh with the state of Maryland.   Fox News is reporting that “Earlier this week, a group of Maryland lawmakers, all Democrats, called for the state to conduct its own criminal investigation into decades-old sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh …”  A letter in response from the Montgomery County Police and the Montgomery County  State’s Attorney’s Office indicated they would conduct a state level investigation into such allegations if the victim filed the complaint.

If as I predict Ford files the complaint with the state of Maryland, the investigation would be difficult to complete by Friday, October 5.   Almost certainly Senate Democrats would demand under penalty of #MeToo that the Senate confirmation vote on the Kavanaugh nomination must be postponed until the Maryland state investigation has concluded and the State’s Attorney has made a charging decision.

Question:  Why did President Trump assign the Brett Kavanaugh supplemental background investigation to the FBI and not the Office of Personnel Management, National Background Investigations Bureau ?  Why were Senate Democrats and some Republicans so intent on getting the FBI involved in this?

Given the allegations of FBI and DoJ wrongdoing in connection with the 2016 presidential campaign, and particularly considering the mounting evidence that the FBI and DoJ knowingly submitted  applications which intentionally included false and misleading information to obtain a FISA warrant and three renewals to surveil Carter Page, a Trump campaign low-level staffer,  why would anyone want the FBI anywhere near the Kavenaugh mess?  The supplemental BI does not require the involvement of any criminal investigative body, certainly not the FBI.

The supplemental BI is an administrative investigation, not a criminal one.  NBIB agents would not be asking questions predicated on proving or disproving criminal allegations; they would be investigating to gather factual information which the sponsoring agency could use to determine an applicant’s suitability or fitness for federal employment.

Here is a link to Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s letter sent to the Senate Judiciary Committee today, 09-24-2018.

Not surprisingly, you may have some difficulty finding this entire letter linked in any of the national skews media’s online sites.

The only disagreement I have with Judge Kavanaugh’s letter is his politely addressing Feinstein as “The Honorable Dianne Feinstein.”  Among all the adjectives that could be used to describe the Rankest Committee Member on the Senate Judiciary Committee, “Honorable” is not among them.

If you believe the national skews media, the Rankest Member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Dianne Feinstein, is refusing to let Committee Chairman Charles Grassley see the original Kavanaugh letter from Christine Blasey Ford.

Why not?  Supposedly that is the letter that has launched the current phase of the “intergalactic freakshow” known as the Kavanaugh Confirmation Hearing.  As far as we know, the letter is the best evidence of the collective thoughts of Christine Blasey Ford (and no one else) about Brett Kavanaugh’s suitability to be an Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court.

Why doesn’t Feinstein want to hand over the original letter to Grassley?  Very likely it’s because Grassley would want to know every detail of the letter’s provenance.    He would quite properly want the letter authenticated.  That is important because the original letter “locks in” Ford to the information in the letter.

That letter is represented to be the original work of Christine Blasey Ford, a present-day writing of her recollection of an alleged incident that occurred in 1982 involving Kavanaugh and her.   Presumably that letter contains all the relevant information in her recollection of the alleged incident.  So for her to suddenly now in September 2018 remember some highly relevant detail from 1982 that isn’t in the letter would be highly suspicious.

Among others, she should be asked these questions under oath and under penalty of perjury:

• Did you write and send this letter on your own initiative?  With whom did you discuss writing and sending a letter concerning Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination before doing it?
• Confirm that these were your words and and ideas only rather than the words of any second party such as attorneys Debra Katz or Lisa Banks, Representative Anna Eshoo or her staff, or Senator Dianne Feinstein or her staff.
• Were prior versons of this letter prepared and then modified in any way or even completely rewritten after consultation with any other parties such as Eshoo, Feinstein, Katz, Banks, etc.?     Identify all persons with whom you discussed this letter before preparing and sending this (original) version.

The purpose of Grassley’s reasonable demand for truthful answers to those questions is to reassure the Judiciary Committee that Ford’s testimony is based only on her own personal knowledge and belief of the incident as it occurred in 1982.

Asking those questions of Ford under oath gives her the opportunity to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth in her own words, not the words of some attorney or political hack or staffer or polygraph examiner.     If someone has applied either subtle or coercive outside influence on Ford to get her to testi-lie under oath before the Judiciary Committee, she needs to reveal that to avoid committing perjury and to keep her own and Judge Kavanaugh’s reputations intact.

In today’s episode of the Washington, DC, soap opera entitled “As the Barstool Spins,” we learn that Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser Christine Blasey Ford has been receiving violent threats.  According to a post in TheHill.com,  “[Ford] has been the target of vicious harassment and even death threats. As a result of these kind of threats, her family was forced to relocate out of their home. Her email has been hacked, and she has been impersonated online.”

TheHill.com blog post goes on to say that, “Ford’s lawyers said in the letter that she would not testify during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing set for Monday until the FBI investigates her allegations of sexual assault against Kavanaugh.”

I don’t get it.

Even if the FBI had the legal jurisdiction to open such an investigation (it doesn’t), how exactly would the FBI investigating her allegation that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in high school in 1982 make the threats stop?  The FBI would be investigating very stale 1982 leads of a crime that would never be prosecuted, not the 2018 threats reportedly being made against Ford.

Ford’s testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee would be limited to matters of her own personal knowledge, not the results of any FBI (or anyone else’s) investigation.

My opinion is that the letter from Ford’s lawyers, Katz and Banks, demanding a FBI investigation in return for Ford’s testimony is nothing more than another effort  delay the vote to confirm or reject Kavanaugh’s appointment.    That strategy seems contrary to their client’s and her family’s safety interests.  It seems to me that the quicker Kavanaugh is confirmed or rejected, the sooner any threat made or posed to Ford and her family loses its potency.   Ford’s attorneys ought to be trying to expedite her testimony’s completion rather than delay its commencement.

If Ford’s lawyers, Katz and Banks, are sincerely concerned about threats against Ford and her family, they need to be coordinating with the appropriate California law enforcement agencies who do have jurisdiction over threats of violence, extortion, stalking, witness intimidation, etc.

The FBI should very politely hand attorneys Debra Katz and Lisa Banks a bucket of sand and tell them to go pound it.

Who among you did not expect the Democrats to produce at the very last second “someone” who would testify that Federal District Judge Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee for the US Supreme Court, committed some unspeakable act upon her innocent body?

The Democrat’s “someone” this time is Christine Blasey Ford, a professor from Palo Alto University in California.  Ford alleges that about 35 years ago in 1982 when Kavanaugh was a junior in high school and she was a sophomore, they were at a party together at a private residence in Maryland.  She alleges Kavanaugh was drunk, held her down on a bed, tried to remove her clothing, and rubbed her through her clothing.

Ford’s information was provided in a letter to California US Representative Anna Eshoo and then on to Senator Dianne Feinstein as an allegation.   The content of the information, an allegation of wrongdoing,  qualifies it as “derogatory.”   The question is whether Ford and her information are both “credible.”   (more…)