Still More Lack of Corroboration for Christine Blasey Ford
It doesn’t mean she’s lying, but you can add it to the growing list of potential corroborating facts that aren’t panning out:
CNN has learned that the committee has reached out to a longtime friend of Ford named Leland Ingham Keyser.
“I understand that you have been identified as an individual who was in attendance at a party that occurred circa 1982 described in a recent Washington Post article,” a committee staffer wrote Keyser earlier this week.
On Saturday night, her lawyer, Howard Walsh, released a statement to CNN and the Senate Judiciary Committee.
“Simply put,” Walsh said, “Ms. Keyser does not know Mr. Kavanaugh and she has no recollection of ever being at a party or gathering where he was present, with, or without, Dr. Ford.”
It’s still not clear to me where the suggestion originated that Ford claims Keyser was at the party. The CNN report attributes it to a staffer but I don’t know where the staffer got that information. (Keep in mind that, to my knowledge, Sen. Grassley and other Republican senators still don’t have an unredacted copy of Ford’s letter sent to Feinstein.)
Meanwhile, what to make of this? The Washington Post interviewed Ford and quoted her as claiming that she was worried when Trump was elected because Kavanaugh had been mentioned as a possible replacement for Scalia. Here’s the beginning of their piece:
When Donald Trump won his upset presidential victory in 2016, Christine Blasey Ford’s thoughts quickly turned to a name most Americans had never heard of but one that had unsettled her for years: Brett M. Kavanaugh.
Kavanaugh — a judge on the prestigious U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit — was among those mentioned as a possible replacement for Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, who died in 2016. When Trump nominated Neil M. Gorsuch, Ford was relieved but still uneasy.
Just one problem: as Alex Pappas notes, Kavanaugh was not on Trump’s list when he was elected. The original list of names released in September 2016 included only these 11 people: Keith Blackwell, Charles Canady, Steven Colloton, Allison Eid, Neil Gorsuch, Raymond Gruender, Thomas Hardiman, Raymond Kethledge, Joan Larsen, Mike Lee, and Thomas Lee. Gorsuch was picked from the list and was confirmed in April 2017. In November 2017, more a year after the election, five more names were added: Amy Coney Barrett, Britt Grant, Brett Kavanaugh, Kevin Newsom, and Patrick Wyrick.
None of this means that it’s impossible that Kavanaugh was mentioned as a dark horse replacement option for Scalia somewhere. But if his name came up it was more likely to be as a discussion of why he wasn’t on the list. Take this Wall Street Journal article as an example:
That scrutiny may have doomed the chances of once-rising members of that conservative class, such as Sixth Circuit Judge Jeffrey Sutton and Judge Brett Kavanaugh of the District of Columbia Circuit, both omitted from the initial Trump lists.
This is not a silver bullet in the heart of Ford’s story, but it is another thing that makes you go “hmmmm.”
UPDATE: Actually, the list of 11 was generated in May 2016 and expanded to 21 names in September 2016. Kavanaugh’s name was not among the 21. Beldar collected the details here. The point about Ford’s memory stands with this correction. If anything, the point is even stronger.
[Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.]