President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 6, 2018, for the third day of his confirmation to replace retired Justice Anthony Kennedy. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)
It’s amazing how this keeps happening.
As I wrote this morning, The New York Times has covered themselves in glory with their latest attempted hit on Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The original article in question was based on a new book written by Times reporters. Unlike Mollie Hemingway’s brilliant, well researched book, these “reporters” set out with an agenda and did everything they could to form the narrative they wanted to push. That means shifting and molding supposed evidence into what they desire vs. what reality is dictating.
Want proof? One of the claims made in the book is that the Ramirez incident was the “talk of the campus.” They also claimed seven instances of corroboration to prove this, but when you put them under scrutiny, almost none of it holds up.
Credit to Byron York for researching this further.
Pogrebin and Kelly claim that extensive evidence supports the Ramirez allegation. “At least seven people, including Ms. Ramirez’s mother, heard about the Yale incident long before Mr. Kavanaugh was a federal judge,” they write in the article. “Two of those people were classmates who learned of it just days after the party occurred, suggesting that it was discussed among students at the time.”
The article did not, however, discuss what any of those seven people actually said about the alleged incident. Nevertheless, partisans quickly seized on it to support their position on Kavanaugh. There was “substantial corroboration” for Ramirez’s story, tweeted Susan Hennessey, editor of the influential blog Lawfare. For their part, some Democratic presidential candidates — Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, Beto O’Rourke, and Pete Buttigieg — cited the story as (additional) cause for Kavanaugh to be impeached.
So what’s the truth here? Who were these seven people and did they actually provide corroboration of the account? In a word, no.
New Kavanaugh book claims seven people back up Deborah Ramirez allegation. That’s when things get a bit silly. https://t.co/vlkZTPxYG4 pic.twitter.com/pIsL5XxAws
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) September 17, 2019
None of the seven are able to tie Kavanaugh to the supposed event. Even the account of Ramirez’s own mother leaves more questions than answers.
Something happened at Yale.
That’s literally all she told her mother, who is now being used as corroborative evidence.
Let’s also remember this was 35 years ago on a college campus. There were likely no shortage of stories over the years involving drunk people exposing themselves. Let’s live in reality and admit that college students do stupid things. Some of these claims could be remembering totally different happenings. Regardless, none of this provides any corroboration that Kavanaugh himself did anything untoward.
Despite that, the book says the above is enough to make Ramirez’s claims “ring true.”
That is enough for Pogrebin and Kelly, who conclude, “The claims of Deborah Ramirez, while not proven by witnesses, also ring true.” Perhaps that will convince some readers. For others: When anti-Kavanaugh partisans cite “substantial corroboration” for Ramirez’s allegation, it’s good to keep in mind who really said what.
Since when is “ringing true” a journalistic standard? It’s the same nonsense we heard all through the Russia-gate fiasco. In fact, “ringing true” is often based on one’s own partisan sensibilities. These writers wanted to believe Ramirez, so they carefully sought out evidence to confirm their biases with no thought for whether any of it was true or could be proven. That’s not journalism, it’s activism.
Honestly, and perhaps this will get me in trouble, but I think this entire ordeal is ridiculous. Even if Kavanaugh exposed himself at a party, that hardly disqualifies him for a Supreme Court position 35 years later. College campuses are not bastions of responsibility and morality. The Times trying to dredge this back up and presenting it as far more than it is follows a pattern of senseless, partisan hit jobs being perpetrated on Republicans. From what we’ve seen of this new book so far, it looks to be a dumpster fire of narrative pushing and misrepresentations. No one should take it seriously after how badly these two writers and their work have crashed and burned the last few days.
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