Seven Democratic Senators demanded answers from FBI Director Christopher Wray after the FBI revealed that more than 4,500 tips that had come in via a hotline regarding questionable behavior of then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh went unanswered by the FBI and were instead sent to the White House Counsel’s office.
Senators Sheldon Whitehouse (RI), Chris Coons (DE), Dick Durbin (IL), Patrick Leahy (VT), Richard Blumenthal (CT), Mazie Hirono (HI), and Cory Booker (NJ) want to know what the disposition of the calls is and why the FBI took no action when they were collected. The seven are members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that screened Kavanaugh in 2018.
“The admissions in your letter corroborate and explain numerous credible accounts by individuals and firms that they had contacted the FBI with information ‘highly relevant to . . . allegations’ of sexual misconduct by Justice Kavanaugh, only to be ignored,” the senators write in their letter sent today. “If the FBI was not authorized to or did not follow up on any of the tips that it received from the tip line, it is difficult to understand the point of having a tip line at all.”
Kavanaugh had been accused of sexual assault while he was a high school student by a woman who had met up with Kavanaugh around 1982. She accused him of forcing himself on her while she was at a small gathering during the summer.
In the course of his confirmation hearings, Kavanaugh made a number of dubious statements and outright lies regarding his conduct, his self-written profile in his high school yearbook, and various accusations of questionable behavior that went on through his years in law school.
Under Republican leadership, however, the Senate Judiciary Committee refused to hear testimony from anyone other than the accuser in the single incident, Christine Blasey Ford, who was 15 at the time. Kavanaugh gave a series of excuses for denying the accusation, including that he was with his buddies P.J. and Squee lifting weights at Tobin’s house. He also weepingly announced his love of beer.