Brett Kavanaugh.Photo: Susan Walsh/AP/Shutterstock
The FBI is facing criticism for its handling of a background investigation into Supreme Court JusticeBrett Kavanaughafter the agency disclosed that itreceived more than 4,500 tipsin relation to the 2018 inquiry.
The agency says it provided any “relevant” tips to the Trump administration’s White House counsel.
Kavanaugh, 56, ignited controversy in 2018 after former PresidentDonald Trumpannounced his nomination to the high court, days after Justice Anthony Kennedyannounced his retirementin what was widely viewed as a surprise.
Shortly after his nomination, Kavanaugh — a former federal appeals court judge —was faced with allegations that he sexually assaulted a former classmate while in high school.
Christine Blasey Fordaccused Kavanaughof pinning her down to a bed, groping her and trying to remove her clothes at a high school party in the early 1980s.
Speaking to Fox News after the allegations became public, Kavanaugh denied Ford’s claims.
“He began running his hands over my body and grinding into me,” Ford said in the testimony. “I yelled, hoping that someone downstairs might hear me, and I tried to get away from him, but his weight was heavy.”
The FBI begana week-long investigationinto the sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh — all of which the judge has denied — after Republican Sen.Jeff Flakeof Arizona dramaticallyasked Senate leadership to delay the full vote on his nominationfor an FBI probe.
Though Democrats have long maintained that the findings of the investigation were unclear, Republicans argued they vindicated the judge, and the Senate ultimately confirmed Kavanaugh’s nomination in anarrow 50-48vote.
Now, two years later, a letter from the FBI to Democratic senators Chris Coons and Sheldon Whitehouse reveals at least some of what its background investigation into Kavanaugh yielded.
The June 30 letter, released Thursday, noted that the FBI set up a tip line in order to centralize information related to Kavanaugh. According to the agency, “the FBI received over 4,500 tips, including phone calls and electronic submissions,” as a result. Those tips, it added, were sent to the Trump White House — even though Trump had nominated Kavanaugh in the first place.
Whitehouse, 65, added in another tweet that the agency had been “misleading as hell” in claiming that it followed proper procedures.
“I charged that the ‘tip line’ was really a tip dump, with all the tips going straight into the dumpster without investigation,” Whitehouse wrote. “In fact it was a tip dump where all the tips went straight to White House Counsel without investigation. Same difference.”
In a statement shared to Twitter, Ford’s attorneys said that the FBI should have referred any tips to the Criminal Investigation Division rather than the Trump White House.
“Because the FBI and Trump’s White House Counsel hid the ball on this, we do not know how many of those 4,500 tips were consequential, how many of those tips supported Dr. Ford’s testimony, or how many showed that Kavanaugh perjured himself during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee,” the attorney said in the statement. “Our nation deserved better.”
source: people.com
