‘Brett Kavanaugh should start suing people for libel, or the Justice Department should come to his rescue…’
(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The New York Times dropped another potentially libelous bombshell on Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh—then quietly dialed it back Sunday evening after the sensationalist headline had already broken.
Undeterred by plummeting media credibility in the wake of recent scandals involving careless or biased journalism, the paper published an article Saturday, adapted from a forthcoming book by two reporters, with claims that another sexual assault accusation had emerged against Kavanaugh.
In response, several radical Democrats seeking the nomination to run in next year’s presidential election reflexively called for Kavanaugh to be impeached.
Sens. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., as well as former Housing Secretary Julian Castro, were among those who rushed to falsely accuse Kavanaugh of lying and demand extreme measures.
However, a day after unloading its hit piece, the Times updated the online article to reflect that the purported victim in the assault refused to be interviewed and that several friends said she did not recall the incident.
The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway was one of those to point out the far-left newspaper’s stealthily inserted correction.
BOMBSHELL: New York Times corrects Kavanaugh smear to note alleged victim does not recall any such incident. pic.twitter.com/yigeOyOCzo
— Mollie (@MZHemingway) September 16, 2019
As Hemingway noted, the only firsthand source used by the Times was Max Stier, a Yale classmate of Kavanaugh’s with close ties to Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Conservative groups on Monday condemned the Left’s reckless and harmful pattern of using sloppy reporting to wage attacks against political and ideological adversaries.
“Each week Democratic presidential candidates offer up a different far-left idea that alienates the vast majority of voters in America,” said Jesse Hunt, communications director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which called on Senate Democrats and Democratic candidates to denounce the smear.
“This shameful attack—aided by a few members of the media—is nothing more than a blatant attempt to undermine the Supreme Court and the will of the people who voted for a conservative judiciary,” Hunt said. “Every Democratic Senate candidate who sits in silence will be held accountable by voters in their respective states.”
President Donald Trump also defended Kavanaugh and encouraged him to hold the media accountable for its willful, politically motivated negligence.
Brett Kavanaugh should start suing people for libel, or the Justice Department should come to his rescue. The lies being told about him are unbelievable. False Accusations without recrimination. When does it stop? They are trying to influence his opinions. Can’t let that happen!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 15, 2019
Character Assassination
The latest episode mirrored several other debunked claims of sexual assault by Kavanaugh as a teenager and college student—including allegations pushed by disgraced attorney and accused domestic abuser Michael Avenatti, who frequently appeared on CNN and other cable networks during the Kavanaugh hearings.
Only one accusation—the vague, three-decades-old account by Christine Blasey Ford—despite being rife with inconsistencies and conflicting witness accounts, could not otherwise be discredited.
After Ford and Kavanaugh testified at a highly watched hearing by the Senate Judiciary Committee, former Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., brokered an agreement to send the beleaguered judge to a full floor vote pending the results of a comprehensive FBI investigation.
That investigation ultimately concluded that there was insufficient evidence to corroborate Ford’s claims.
Even so, one of Ford’s highly-partisan attorneys, Debra Katz, who had been recommended to her by Sen. Dianne Feinstein and funded by anti-Kavanaugh activist groups, recently celebrated that the unproven accusations had cast lingering aspersions on the father of two and tarnished his reputation.
Katz told a feminist conference in April that in their underlying bid to “harm misogynist Republicans,” those promulgating the hazy high-school rape claims had succeeded.
“Elections have consequences, but he will always have an asterisk next to his name,” Katz said of Kavanaugh at the University of Baltimore conference.
“When he takes a scalpel to Roe v. Wade, we will know who he is, we know his character, and we know what motivates him, and that is important; it is important that we know, and that is part of what motivated Christine.”
Ford had claimed under oath before Congress that she had come forward out of a sense of civic duty, free from any personal or political vendettas.
After the revelations on Katz’s statements surfaced earlier this month, Senate Judiciary Committee member Thom Tillis, R-NC, called for a deeper investigation into the truthfulness of Ford’s statements before the committee.
Clinton Revenge?
Hemingway noted that the most recent Kavanaugh accuser, Stier, had a long history of being “pitted” against him politically.
The two worked on opposite sides of the scandal that resulted in Bill Clinton’s impeachment, with Kavanaugh on the team of investigators under special prosecutor Ken Starr and Stier on Clinton’s defense team.
Another close Stier associate, David Kendall, went on to represent Hillary Clinton in her own scandal involving the cover-up of an unsecured, private server that she used to send classified emails during her tenure as secretary of State in the Obama administration.
Hemingway noted that a “surprisingly large number of Clinton-affiliated attorneys … kept popping up during [Kavanaugh’s] confirmation hearings,” leading him to say during the opening statement of his testimony that revenge on the Clintons’ behalf may have been a motive.
It would not be the first time that Clinton surrogates had used dubiously sourced claims of salacious sexual innuendo as part of an anti-conservative smear campaign.
The same was true of the Steele Dossier, which Hillary Clinton’s campaign commissioned as opposition research against her opponent, Donald Trump, during the 2016 presidential race.
Deep-state partisans used back channels to convey the now-discredited memos from a British intelligence operative with Kremlin ties to the upper ranks of the Obama FBI.
The agency then used the dossier as justification to spy on the Trump campaign. Partisan intelligence operatives are also believed to have leaked the dossier to the media in January 2017 as part of an effort to discredit the president-elect.
The result was the two-year-long Mueller investigation, which turned up no evidence of misconduct between the Trump campaign and Russia. However, Congressional Democrats continue to insist that the president is guilty and to advance efforts to impeach him.