The 17 Most Striking Moments From the Kavanaugh Hearing
During Thursday’s highly-anticipated hearing on sexual-misconduct allegations against the Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, Christine Blasey Ford, a California professor who accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her while the two were in high school, told lawmakers that she decided to testify because she felt it was her “civic duty.” In an emotional testimony, Ford recalled the night she says she was sexually assaulted in detail. “Brett’s assault on me drastically altered my life,” she said. Kavanaugh denied the allegations in his follow-up testimony.
The proceedings began at 10 a.m. Ford testified first and was questioned by Rachel Mitchell, an Arizona sex-crimes prosecutor. Kavanaugh followed and delivered a defiant statement before the panel. Senators on the Judiciary Committee were each provided five minutes for questioning.
“This is not a trial of Dr. Ford; it’s a job interview for Judge Kavanaugh,” said Ranking Member Dianne Feinstein at the start of the hearing.
Below is a breakdown of the hearing.
1. Chuck Grassley Kicks Off the Hearing by Expressing Frustrations With the Process
Grassley: These allegations could have been investigated in a way that maintained the confidentiality that Dr. Ford requested. Before his hearing, Judge Kavanaugh met privately with 65 senators, including the ranking member [Senator Feinstein]. But the ranking member didn’t ask Judge Kavanaugh about the allegations when she met with him privately in August. The Senate Judiciary Committee held its four-day public hearing from September 4 to September 7. Judge Kavanaugh testified for more than 32 hours in public. We held a closed session for members to ask sensitive questions on the last evening, which the ranking member did not attend. Judge Kavanaugh answered nearly 1,300 written questions submitted by senators after the hearing, more than all prior Supreme Court nominees.
Throughout this period, we did not know about the ranking member’s secret evidence. Then, only at an 11th hour, on the eve of Judge Kavanaugh’s confirmation vote, did the ranking member refer the allegations to the FBI. And then, sadly, the allegations were leaked to the press. That’s where Dr. Ford was mistreated.
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Contrary to what the public has been led to believe, the FBI doesn’t perform any credibility assessments or verify the truth of any events in these background investigations. I’ll quote then-Chairman Joe Biden during Justice Thomas’s confirmation hearing. This is what Senator Biden said: “The next person who refers to an FBI report as being worth anything obviously doesn’t understand anything. The FBI explicitly does not, in this or any other case, reach a conclusion, period. They say he said,
