Dear Senator Flake,
I am grateful you used your leverage to get some sort of FBI inquiry into the allegations made against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, but I’m wondering what follow-up you have in mind.
You’ve said that if the FBI finds that Judge Kavanaugh lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee, his nomination is over. But you didn’t need the FBI to know that he was lying. Not necessarily about what did or didn’t happen in 1983, but numerous statements the judge made in his September 27th testimony are documentably false, down to whether he watched Dr. Blasey Ford’s testimony (a Republican aide says he did watch it; Judge Kavanaugh stated in the hearing that he did not).
The FBI investigation itself indirectly raises other questions. Your colleague Sen. Collins said she found the investigation to have been complete, but that’s transparently false. The Bureau didn’t interview the witnesses proposed by Deborah Ramirez. They didn’t interview numerous college classmates of the judge who came forward to offer their eyewitness testimony about his drinking behavior during college (and thus speak to whether he was truthful with the Senate Judiciary Committee).
Most damningly, they interviewed neither Dr. Blasey Ford nor Judge Kavanaugh. During the most recent testimony, the judge was not only combative, but notably evasive in responding to questions from Democratic senators. In an FBI inquiry, belligerence and evasion don’t work, and so the failure to interview Judge Kavanaugh looks very much like an intentional measure to avoid making him answer difficult questions.
The background issue here is what purpose you had in mind for an FBI investigation. If you wanted to be able to point and say, “The FBI looked, they didn’t find anything, so my conscience is clear in voting ‘Yes,’” then you got what you wanted, what you needed.
