Charles Cooke asks seven good questions about this morning’s affidavit, including one that I (and everyone else who read it) asked: Why was a college student, an adult under the law, attending parties with high-schoolers for years? And not just any parties but parties at which gang rapes happened repeatedly?
And how the hell did this not come up once in interviews with Kavanaugh’s youthful acquaintances? Those interviews have been going on for many years, bear in mind. He’s passed six background checks, has had numerous news stories written about him since he was a young gun on Ken Starr’s team and later an appellate judge, and has been the subject of electron-microscope scrutiny since he was nominated in July. There must have been dozen of witnesses to, not to mention participants in, the activity Swetnick’s affidavit describes. Not one person spoke up until now?
Another good question from Cooke. How come America’s most media-friendly lawyer didn’t hand this off to one of his media pals for investigation before this morning’s bombshell announcement?
Likewise, why did Avenatti and Swetnick bypass the press? Did anyone in the press look into this story? What did they find? The New York Times confirms that “none of Ms. Swetnick’s claims could be independently corroborated by The New York Times, and her lawyer, Michael Avenatti, declined to make her available for an interview.” Why?
Relatedly:
Is [it] not a little strange that there are only two details provided, and that they are happen to be public knowledge already? The two names given are Mark Judge’s and Brett Kavanaugh’s. The time given is “BEACH WEEK,” which is listed on the calendar that Brett Kavanaugh released this morning. Why is there nothing new?
If you think the affidavit was a bombshell as-is, imagine if it had appeared in the Times or Washington Post with reporters claiming they’d interviewed, say, five women who corroborated Swetnick’s account. Kavanaugh would be done. Avenatti knows that, too. So why didn’t he alert the papers before going public?
Reporters find his and Swetnick’s attempt to freelance this curious too:
Not a judgment on the underlying claims, but worth noting that unlike the first two allegations against Kavanaugh, this one is not coming through a news story that was reported out and vetted by journalists. https://t.co/St7QfMKc6A
— megan twohey (@mega2e) September 26, 2018
Megan Twohey is an investigative reporter at the Times. She co-wrote the NYT piece last year that blew up Harvey Weinstein and got a Pulitzer for it, which was shared with Ronan Farrow. Farrow retweeted the tweet above. The media itself is quietly, or maybe not so quietly, signaling a little early skepticism about Avenatti’s bombshell. And why shouldn’t they? Collectively they must have spent hundreds of hours interviewing Kavanaugh friends and acquaintances over the last two months. Not one reporter found anything solid enough to print. So far.
Perhaps this is the reason why, though the left makes numerous references to the growing number of accusers, they never address any of the other accusations’ details. The probability of the ever-widening net of participants, witnesses and victims not being detected by six FBI background checks (or the ongoing media sifting) is nil. The left, in their enthusiasm to destroy Kavanaugh and make sure it sticks, shot themselves in their collective foot. Fortunately for them, they have no credibility to destroy.