During his Fox News interview, Brett Kavanaugh said repeatedly that he wants a “fair process.” That phrase shows up 23 times in the transcript of the interview, in fact. Usually “I just want a fair process where I can be heard” or “I want a fair process where I can defend my integrity.” But when he was asked whether he supports an FBI investigation, he dodged—again using the phrase “fair process,” twice, and “I want to be heard” as well. But Kavanaugh definitely didn’t say that a fair process would involve him being heard by the FBI.
Beyond insisting again and again that he wants “to be heard” in a “fair process,” Kavanaugh used the virgin defense—as in, he can’t have sexually assaulted anyone because “I did not have sexual intercourse or anything close to sexual intercourse in high school or for many years there after”—and he denied that there was “ever a time that you drank so much that you couldn’t remember what happened the night before.” “That did not happen,” Kavanaugh responded.
Kavanaugh said of the second allegation, that he drunkenly exposed himself to Yale classmate Deborah Ramirez, that “If such a thing had happened, it would have been the talk of the campus,” drawing the tweeted response “And so it was – a classmate who heard about it at the time told me he has thought of it every time he’s heard Kavanaugh’s name – for the last 35 years!” from Jane Mayer, one of the New Yorker writers who reported that incident.
By doing the interview at all, Kavanaugh contributed to the unprecedented politicization of the Supreme Court at the hands of Republicans, and he may have handed Democrats more hard questions to ask him. Appearing on CBS, Sen. Amy Klobuchar responded to the interview by noting Kavanaugh’s denial of ever having blacked out from drinking, saying that “those are things that really go to credibility given some of the stories circulating out there.”
Kavanaugh again discredited himself not just with highly questionable claims like that one but most of all through his insistence that he wants a fair process, which in his view apparently includes Fox News interviews but not an FBI investigation. But he was on Fox News not to convince anyone who doesn’t believe him, but to shore up Republican support and impress Donald Trump with his fighting ways. Look to Trump’s Twitter feed for whether Kavanaugh succeeded at that.
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