Grassley Falsely Claims ‘Not a Whiff’ of Kavanaugh Sex Misconduct

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Though Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee hired a professional prosecutor to question Christine Blasey Ford—who accuses Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault—apparently to avoid the spectacle of the all-male GOP side of the panel attacking a sexual assault survivor, the committee’s chairman Chuck Grassley of Iowa opened the hearing with a statement decsribed by one media outlet as a “grotesque partisan screed.”  In that statement, during which Grassley seemed to say that the recent experiences of Ford and Kavanaugh were equivalent claiming that both had “been through a terrible couple of weeks,” Grassley also cited Kavanaugh’s earlier hearings and background checks by the FBI. “Nowhere in any of these six FBI reports, which committee investigators have reviewed on a bipartisan basis, was there ever a whiff of any issue—at all—related in any way to inappropriate sexual behavior,” Grassley claimed in his opening remarks. But on her Twitter account, investigative reporter Marcy Wheeler rebutted Grassley's claim, and noted that in fact there had been a “whiff” of sexual misconduct in Kavanaugh’s earlier testimony. “Grassley in opening statement says there was no whiff of allegation about inappropriate sexual behavior,” Wheeler wrote. “False, there was a whiff: Kavanaugh's close ties with (Alex) Kozinski, and his refusal to check to see whether he got some of Kozinski's sexually explicit emails.” Alex Kozinski, as AVN.com has reported, was a federal judge on the Ninth Circuit Court who last year was forced to resign after a sexual harassment scandal.  Kavanaugh served as a clerk for Kozinski in 1990 and 1991 and remained friends with Kozinski throughout the years. During Kavanaugh’s 2006 confirmation hearing for his seat on the Washington, D.C., federal court, Kozinski described Kavanaugh as “my good friend.”  During his confirmation hearings Kavanaugh was asked whether he received sexually inappropriate emails from an email list operated by Kozinski, on which the Ninth Circuit judge would send off-color jokes and occasional sexually explicit images. Kavanaugh claimed that he did not “remember anything like that.” “Grassley boasts that Kavanaugh answered more (questions) than any prior candidate,” Wheeler wrote. “Except many of the questions were insolent non-answers, such as to the question of whether he received abusive Kozinski emails.” In fact, when Delaware Senator Chris Coons asked Kavanaugh, “Have you conducted a search of your email accounts and/or correspondence with Judge Kozinski in an effort to provide an accurate response to the preceding question? If not, why not?” he received another “non-answer” from Kavanaugh. “I do not remember receiving inappropriate emails of a sexual nature from Judge Kozinski,” Kavanaugh said, repeating his previous answer to Coons verbatim. Kavanaugh has dismissed all of the sexual assault allegations against him, including the most recent allegation that he “targeted” women for gang rapes, as “smears.” Photo By U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit / Wikimedia Commons Public Domain