Told police? Does this mean a police report was completed or just referred to an officer who said boys will be boys and moved on, no report in hand?
If there is a police report and she named names … one wonders if that might be enough for Senator Biscuit (R-AZ)
I believe Swetnick. I think the particular challenge she has is that she was from a local public school (Gaithersburg MD) (not a private school) and ended up at parties where a lot of private school folks were and folks from other schools. The age range was big. Her personal connections to people at the parties are limited. Public schools are typically larger in the big suburban counties and people disperse. The connections are not quite as strong. Therefore, she may have trouble producing quality witnesses in the way that Ford and Ramirez have identified. I think she just got caught up in a party circuit that had become the stuff of local urban legend, but she was naive and didn’t realize how bad it was in there.
I do not know if Swetnick will be able to advance her claims very far without added witnesses. But this is something that the FBI would be able to investigate and fill out the picture if they were focused on it.
She has already provided value, as she moved the Overton Window of the types of things that Kavanaugh was capable of doing when she reported her harrowing allegation. That enabled the Democrats to push the envelope on questions to ask Kavanaugh and the media and public believed such questions to be legitimate given all that we had learned about him up to that point.
The other piece of the Kavanaugh story that is coming together is that he always works with a buddy. Mark Judge or Chris Dudley are his two instigators or wingmen. These are people he looks up to and tries to impress. That’s the portrait of an insecure man. I also think Kavanaugh may have sociopathic tendencies which alcohol appears to exacerbate. The previously unreported rape story (the worst allegation of them all imo) also involved a 2nd person to egg Kavanaugh on. We don’t know the date or time, but I speculate that if the story is true, that Chris Dudley or Mark Judge had something to do with it, unless there is a 3rd mentor type that we’re not aware of.
There’s a backstory of how Kavanaugh went from the irascible asshole from Yale to the irascible asshole partisan warrior for Ken Starr. There’s a photo of Ken Starr and his boys and Kavanaugh is standing next to him. Starr viewed Kavanaugh as his hit man, the guy who would bend the rules to get things done for the team. What does Ken Starr know of Kavanaugh’s past? Has he covered up anything for him the way he did at Baylor? I suspect this is an area worth a look.
Love that reference! Imagine, someday there will be nobody in the US who thinks Brett Kavanaugh sitting in judgment of others is a good idea.
If only Ford would file at least a civil lawsuit against Kavenagh in the appropriate Maryland court, that would really tee things up for later if he’s confirmed. Filing a criminal complaint as well would be even better. Then the witnesses would be deposed under oath, and then testify.
One trick that Republicans are using is taking each of the many allegations as entirely separate things, rather than acknowledging that taken together they all support each other. Which is the usual way these things are viewed, it certainly was in the case of say Al Franken. You heard a lot of “Well one accusation is one thing, but when you have multiple women saying the same thing that’s a different story”.
What they’re doing here is taking each one separately and talking about how it can’t be proven beyond a doubt, and then dismissing it. And they’re doing this at an official level, the prosecutor who served as a front for the GOP Senators says that she couldn’t “prosecute” based on what Dr Ford said. But no one is trying to prosecute Kavanaugh, that’s a false measure. They’re evaluating his fitness for the Supreme Court, and the multiple allegations of similar behavior make it very likely that the already believable Dr Ford is in fact telling the truth.
I watched this a while back on how Trump is moving the Overton Window:
“He was a very aggressive, very sloppy, mean drunk,” Swetnick said in an interview with NBC News. “I saw him go up to girls and paw on them, try to, you know, get a little too handsy, touching them in private parts. I saw him try to shift clothing.
“I saw him push girls up against walls,” she continued. “He would pretend to stumble into them. He would push his body against them, grope them.”
Trump responded: “You need booze to act that way?? Pussy.”
I think Avenati was had and jumped in before he performed thorough due diligence on Swetnick and her story. Time and timing was of the essence for bringing Swetnick public and Avenati likely had been missing the limelight he once had with Stormy, so his enthusiasm got the best to him and he was likely taken in by an opportunist.
Swetnick was too slick, hyped up, parroting phrases used by others to describe Kavanaugh’s behavior and the alcoholic party times that led to sex crimes. She seemed too eager to tell her story, and had no believable deep emotion about what she underwent, appearing glam and tabloid.
Maybe I just don’t like her ready for prime time style. After seeing CBF, Swetnick to me came off as superficial and only trying to make the scene by jumping on the bandwagon.
I think what makes Swetnick believable to me is that she strikes me that she was a party circuit type girl in high school/college who only got out of it because she suffered a horrific abuse. Some people are a little open to dangerous situations or alcohol/drugs. Others are not. She strikes me as the former and I think is probably more reflective of the types of people who attended these parties.
I don’t like this idea that the only good victims are those who seem “real” or something.
Her government clearances provide to me an assist her because she has more to lose.
Anyway, once someone starts the ball running, it’s likely more people will come out of the woodwork. Likewise, she is supposedly too “ready for prime time” (whatever that means; again “real” now is somehow being raw and not preparing, perhaps by people comfortable with interviews to begin with) but she is only “parroting” standard things. If she was so “slick,” perhaps she would be more able to sound less “phony.”
Since the whole comment is basically a complaint over style, I’m not sure of the evidence of Avenati jumping the gun.
He then added, “Having enough money to hire lawyers to threaten and silence the victims after the fact was always enough for me.”
I would say her demeanor was suspect with the style contributing to her disingenuous aura. Hey, it’s just how she came off to me.
Yes, she could be very experienced in that early eighties lifestyle and was burnt by it in Maryland, but plugging her destruction then into the Kavanaugh debacle for notoriety is what I came away with.
While I understand what Checkmate is saying about demeanor (she doesn’t seem as unscripted, unrehearsed as the Professor), I could let that go. What concerns me is that many details she described were different from what was in her sworn statement. “Boys lined up at the bedroom door” versus “they didn’t line up but they were gathered near it.” She said she was “aware” CavaNOT and Judge were spiking the punch, in the interview she admitted she didn’t see that happen.
Much as I would like to see support for Ford (not that I want more woman victimized), I want all if of it to be precise, accurate and as credible as possible.
As a woman, I KNOW that there are so many, MANY women (and men) who have been sexually abused and accosted. I KNOW that there are a small number of false accusations. I also KNOW that the other side will hang onto and hold up these false stories to besmirch true victims. Like the damn Duke Lacrosse team and their accuser. That’s favorite story of the right and it still gets trotted out to smear women.
It is possible she is telling the truth but on her own this isn’t going anywhere. She needs that police report if it exists or something of that nature to be credible at all. The fact that she has pulled some legal fast ones in the past makes it a really heavy lift to believe her. I think there is plenty to focus on elsewhere. If her story is true, it is simply unprovable and Kavanaugh does get the presumption of innocence in that case. Better to run down the stories with more evidence and focus on his efforts to lie and evade. That makes him unfit for the court. None of these claims are really strong enough to put him in jail, but they (and maybe more importantly his response to them) should mean he does not need to be on SCOTUS.
Thanks for posting this.
McConnell’s comment that Kavanaugh was the “mastermind” of the alleged punch incidents seems a complete fabrication. Kavanaugh is no Silence of the Lambs ethnopharmacologist. The only significant facts relevant to these hearings are whether such punches were being formulated and if he was aware of it as it shows intent to commit sexual battery and conspiracy to do so.