‘A “he said, she said” case is incredibly difficult to prove. But this case is even weaker than that…’

(Ben Sellers, Liberty Headlines) The Arizona prosecutor and sex-crimes expert whom Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee hired to interrogate Christine Blasey Ford last Thursday has released a report outlining her independent assessment of the testimony.

While most news analyses have portrayed Ford’s testimony as a “credible” account of having been assaulted by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh when both were teenagers, Mitchell’s report brings to the forefront several inconsistencies and irregularities that would weaken the case from a courtroom standpoint.

Ultimately, she concludes that Ford’s story would not be strong enough for a reasonable prosecutor to pursue, based on a sparse “preponderance-of-the-evidence standard.”

“A ‘he said, she said’ case is incredibly difficult to prove,” she says in the report. “But this case is even weaker than that. Dr. Ford identified other witnesses to the event, and those witnesses either refuted her allegations or failed to corroborate them.”

Several of the points Mitchell raises in the nine-page report relate to vagueness and changes over time in Ford’s description of events, such as a shift in the timeline from the mid-1980s to the early 80s to the more specific “summer of 1982.”

“While it is common for victims to be uncertain about dates, Dr. Ford failed to explain how she was suddenly able to narrow the timeframe to a particular season and particular year,” she writes.

Mitchell goes on to mention that initially Ford did not identify Kavanaugh by name when relaying to her husband and counselor what she alternately referred to as a “sexual assault” and “physical abuse.” It was only after Kavanaugh’s name surfaced as a clear front-runner for a conservative Supreme Court appointment that she first named him as her assailant.

Mitchell also notes the varying levels of detail in Ford’s account of the party—how she was able to remember having only had one beer but not the address of the house or how she made it home.

Additional problems that Mitchell raises are discrepancies in Ford’s account of being able to hear party-goers talk while also saying that the music was turned up so nobody could hear her scream.

The number of people Ford said were present—both at the party and in the room of the assault—has varied, and Ford has been vague on other details, such as who was the “fourth boy” at the party and her specific connections to the group.

During the hearing, several of the committee Democrats, including Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, tried to spin these narrative holes as supporting plausibility of Ford, a psychology professor at Palo Alto University.

“Someone composing a story can make it all come together in a seamless way, but someone who is honest … is also candid about what he or she cannot remember,” Blumenthal said on Thursday.

As Mitchell notes in her report, though, Ford’s memory issues are not simply relegated to the events of 36 years ago; she also had difficulty remembering noteworthy recent details like whether she provided counseling notes to The Washington Post and whether she took a polygraph test on the day of her grandmother’s funeral or the day after.

One of the most telling moments in the testimony undermining Ford’s credibility was her claim that she could not testify sooner due to a fear of flying. Mitchell then outlined for her the numerous airplane trips that she had taken both for business and vacation.

Mitchell also points out Ford’s vague accounts of the impact that the alleged trauma had, claiming that it caused her to do poorly her first two years at the University of North Carolina—but clearly not so poorly in her final years of high school that she was unable to gain entry to the selective school.

The final third of Mitchell’s report is a detailed timeline of events from July 6, when Ford contacted the office of Rep. Anna Eshoo, through the day before the hearing.

Mitchell’s timeline reveals the bad faith with which Ford’s lawyers and the politicians involved had acted in their efforts to politicize the assault narrative, so as to maximize the harm to Kavanaugh and Republicans.

“The activities of congressional Democrats and Dr. Ford’s attorneys likely affected Dr. Ford’s account,” Mitchell says.

Others have pointed to the fact that Ford initially claimed her friends had recommended attorneys to her before finally conceding that Feinstein’s office had done so, and also that Ford claimed to have little knowledge over who was covering her legal expenses and how the substantial amounts of money being raised for her were being used.

After a video surfaced of Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, secretively handing an envelope to Ford attorney Michael Bromwich during the hearing, left-leaning ‘fact-check’ site Snopes.com attempted to debunk the mystery by relying on the explanation from the congresswoman’s office that it was simply fan mail to Ford.

Both of Ford’s lawyers claimed at the hearing to be working pro bono.

Despite the compelling questions she raises in the report, Mitchell reminds the reader in the preface that the hearing was not a prosecution and that the implications of it may be different from those of a trial.

“There is no clear standard of proof for allegations made during the Senate’s confirmation process,” she said. “But the world in which I work is the legal world, not the political world. Thus, I can only provide my assessment of Dr. Ford’s allegations in that legal context.”