Senator Jeff Flake (R-AZ) admitted Sunday night on 60 Minutes that he wouldn’t have thrown the Kavanaugh confirmation into disarray if he was running for office again.
The retiring Senator demanded an FBI investigation into 11th hour claims by several women that the Supreme Court nominee sexually assaulted them, despite the fact that the accusers have foggy memories and dubious, uncorroborated accounts.
When asked if he would have asked for the new probe if he were up for reelection in the November midterms, Flake responded: “Not a chance,” adding “There’s no value in reaching across the aisle… there’s no currency for that anymore. There’s no incentive.”
After failing to convince the Judiciary Committee to abstain from voting pending an FBI investigation, he insisted that he would vote “no” on the full Senate floor – and was joined by Alaska GOP Senator Lisa Murkowski – one day after she was seen being badgered in a hallways by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA).
Flake and Murkowski’s gambit meant that the Senate wouldn’t have the majority required to advance Kavanaugh.
In the meantime, the left continues to pound on Kavanaugh’s record, while the FBI probe has bought time for new accusers to emerge. As we reported Sunday, with Washington in a frenzy over the FBI’s probe of Judge Kavanaugh, which according to Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley would be no more than a week long and would be limited solely to “current credible allegations”, a new and potentially explosive allegation has emerged.
Late on Sunday, Charles Ludington, a former varsity basketball player and friend of Kavanaugh’s at Yale, told the Washington Post that he plans to deliver a statement to the FBI field office in Raleigh on Monday detailing violent drunken behavior by Kavanaugh in college.
Ludington, an associate professor at North Carolina State University, provided a copy of the statement to The Post.
In it, Ludington says in one instance, Kavanaugh initiated a fight that led to the arrest of a mutual friend: “When Brett got drunk, he was often belligerent and aggressive. On one of the last occasions I purposely socialized with Brett, I witnessed him respond to a semi-hostile remark, not by defusing the situation, but by throwing his beer in the man’s face and starting a fight that ended with one of our mutual friends in jail.”
What prompted this latest last minute memory “recollection” by a peer of Kavanaugh’s? According to the report, Ludington was deeply troubled by Kavanaugh appearing to blatantly mischaracterize his drinking in Senate testimony.
“I do not believe that the heavy drinking or even loutish behavior of an 18 or even 21 year old should condemn a person for the rest of his life,” Ludington wrote. “However … if he lied about his past actions on national television, and more especially while speaking under oath in front of the United States Senate, I believe those lies should have consequences.”
The NYT also got an interview out of Ludington, and reported that Ludington said he frequently saw Judge Kavanaugh “staggering from alcohol consumption” during their student years. He said he planned to tell his story to the F.B.I. at its office in Raleigh, N.C., on Monday.
Kavanaugh told outside counsel Rachel Mitchell during the hearing that he has never “passed out” from drinking. “I’ve gone to sleep,” he said. “But I’ve never blacked out, that’s the allegation. And that’s, that’s wrong.“
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