Six years after Brett Kavanaugh joined the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority, a Democratic senator claims the FBI barely followed up on explosive sexual assault allegations that emerged during his nomination. A report released Tuesday lays out how White House officials kept a tight leash on the FBI’s inquiry, contrary to Trump’s claims at the time that the agency had “free rein” to investigate the claims.
“Far from getting to the bottom of the allegations against Kavanaugh,” reads the report, which was released by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., after years of fighting both the Trump and Biden administrations for clarity, the FBI’s investigation “raised additional questions about the thoroughness of the FBI’s review and whether its scope had been purposely curtailed.”
In September 2018, following Kavanaugh’s initial confirmation hearing, Christine Blasey Ford accused him of assaulting her when the two were in high school in the early 1980s. Soon after, one of Kavanaugh’s college classmates, Deborah Ramirez, came forward to allege that Kavanaugh exposed himself during a party and shoved his penis in her face. Kavanaugh strenuously denied all of the claims.
The accusations sparked another Senate hearing, during which Kavanaugh and Ford both testified. The Senate Judiciary Committee asked the Trump White House to direct the FBI to conduct a “supplemental” investigation focused on the sexual misconduct allegations.
At the time, President Donald Trump dismissed media reports that the FBI’s inquiry would be limited in any way by political expediency. “Actually, I want them to interview whoever they deem appropriate, at their discretion,” he tweeted. Less than two weeks later — during which the FBI interviewed just 10 people, but not Ford or Kavanaugh — Kavanaugh was confirmed on a mostly party-line vote, with Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., giving Republicans the 50th vote in favor.
Manchin and Senate Republicans pointed to the fact that the FBI found little to substantiate the accusations. But Whitehouse’s report says this was the inevitable outcome, since the Trump administration hemmed in the FBI to the point that agents were not authorized to pursue even obvious leads.
The FBI’s investigation was “unreliable, not because of FBI ineptitude, but because the Trump White House tightly controlled the scope of the investigation, preventing the FBI from conducting a thorough investigation that followed all relevant leads as it would in other investigative contexts,” the report claims.
The report draws from exchanges between the FBI and White House officials during the brief investigation, which show the agency itself was confused about what it could and could not run down. FBI officials were puzzled by Trump’s public statements about its “free rein” to investigate Kavanaugh, which conflicted with what White House lawyers had authorized: “limited inquiry” interviews with just a handful of witnesses, out of the dozens who could potentially corroborate Ford’s and Ramirez’s accounts.
“Not only did this practice enable the Trump Administration to kneecap FBI investigators’ ability to adequately investigate those allegations, but the lack of transparency misled the Senate and the public about the investigation’s thoroughness,” the report reads.
Since Kavanaugh’s confirmation, Whitehouse and Senate Democrats have tried to find out just how thoroughly the FBI investigated the allegations. In numerous hearings and letters, they asked FBI Director Christopher Wray for details and documentation but got nothing back until Trump was out of office, according to the report.
Even the Biden administration has been evasive, the report complains, with the White House, FBI, and Justice Department deflecting senators’ inquiries for more than three years. The FBI only agreed to produce hundreds of pages from the Trump years when Whitehouse threatened to hold up a nomination to fill a top DOJ position in November 2023.
“The Congressional report published today confirms what we long suspected,” said Ford’s attorneys in a statement. “The FBI supplemental investigation of then-nominee Brett Kavanaugh was, in fact, a sham effort directed by the Trump White House to silence brave victims and other witnesses who came forward and to hide the truth.”
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