Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings in the fall of 2018 were highly controversial for a variety of reasons, including the scope of the FBI background check that was supposed to be part of the process.
Just two days before the Senate’s confirmation vote, with the FBI review ostensibly complete, Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said it appeared to be “a very thorough investigation.”
That was exactly six years ago this week. Collins’ assessment seemed badly flawed at the time, but it looks considerably worse now. As my MSNBC colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim explained:
The Trump administration did not allow the FBI to conduct a full-scale investigation into the sexual misconduct allegations against Brett Kavanaugh that threatened his Supreme Court confirmation, according to a new report, disputing then-President Donald Trump’s public claims at the time.
In 2018, at the height of the controversy, the late-Sen. Dianne Feinstein — at the time, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s ranking member — said that the FBI’s report on Kavanaugh “looks to be a product of an incomplete investigation that was limited perhaps by the White House.”
Six years later, it appears the California Democrat was on to something.
Following a lengthy review, Democratic Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island released his findings, alleging that the Trump administration “exercised total control over the scope of the investigation” and prevented the FBI from pursuing leads. The result was a “flawed and incomplete” investigation into a Supreme Court nominee, which was “unworthy of reliance by the Senate.”
As a related Washington Post report noted, as Kavanaugh faced sexual misconduct allegations, Trump said that the FBI would have “free rein” to scrutinize the claims. Trump said the FBI was “talking to everybody,” adding by way of social media, “I want them to interview whoever they deem appropriate, at their discretion.”
That, of course, was what the then-president had to say in public. In private, according to Whitehouse’s findings, the Trump administration not only “kneecap[ed] FBI investigators’ ability to adequately investigate those allegations, but the lack of transparency misled the Senate and the public about the investigation’s thoroughness.”
Kavanaugh and the FBI declined to comment, and the Trump campaign called the findings an “attempt to delegitimize the Supreme Court” (which, incidentally, the former president has tried to delegitimize.) Speaking of the GOP candidate, the year after Trump left the White House, he said, in reference to Kavanaugh, “I saved his life. He wouldn’t even be in a law firm. Who would have had him? Nobody. Totally disgraced. Only I saved him. … I saved his life, and I saved his career.” It was a curious quote, which is now seen in a new light. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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