Earlier this evening, the Majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee announced that their “female assistant” hired to asked their questions at the Thursday hearing with Judge Kavanaugh and Professor Blasey Ford would be a Maricopa County, Arizona sex crimes prosecutor named Rachel Mitchell.
It turns out one of the only at-length interviews Mitchell has ever done is with a publication put out by the far right ‘fundamental baptist’ organization Fundamental Baptist Fellowship International (FBFI), an organization closely tied to Bob Jones University and espousing a range of hyper-traditionalist views on gender, sexuality and sexual ethics. Read More
A brief note on Rod Rosenstein. Given all the fireworks there’s an inevitable tendency to see him as some sort of member of the anti-Trump resistance. This is not right. Rosenstein is a career Republican lawyer. He was part of the Starr investigation. He was there during Brett Kavanaugh’s testimony, sitting among his supporters and clearly a big supporter of his nomination. This is just what you’d expect in a high level Justice Department appointment under a Republican administration. One sign of his professionalism or reputation for integrity is that while he got his US Attorney appointment under Bush, he was retained under President Obama. The Obama DOJ did this more than other administrations. But if he were clearly a hack or a clear partisan he wouldn’t have been retained in 2009. When we think of Rosenstein we should think of him as someone who would really really really like to be a team player in every way possible. To his credit, he appears to have limits.
My read here is that Kelly thought or wanted to think that Rosenstein said he was willing to resign. But he refused to resign and made clear that if they wanted him gone Trump would have to fire him. Trump didn’t have the nerve to pull that trigger. Perhaps Kelly made clear that this was something Trump needed to do himself. So here we are.
This is needless to say a very grave development in the Trump presidency. We’ve discussed this possibility, this almost inevitable eventuality so many times the event largely speaks for itself. A critical question, as yet uncertain, is whether Rosenstein resigns or is fired. This is no question of mere nuance. It directly controls under what terms President Trump will be able to replace the Deputy Attorney General and the person who oversees the Special Counsel investigation.
Rod Rosenstein has reportedly tendered his resignation in advance of what he is expecting to be his termination as deputy attorney general.
As you may have already seen, all hell has broken loose over the last hour or so in the already chaotic and ugly Kavanaugh confirmation process. For now I’m simply going to flag and link to the main points. I’ll try to put my thoughts together on them later. Read More
We still have more questions than answers about Ed Whelan’s bizarre twitter thread that accused another Kavanaugh classmate of attacking Prof. Blasey Ford and roiled the already embattled nomination. So for those who didn’t see or would like to read through it again for clues to what happened, here’s the whole thing. Read More
Top GOP senate candidate says Blasey Ford accusation no big deal since it didn’t lead to intercourse. “Again, it was supposedly an attempt or something that never went anywhere.” Story here from Cam Joseph.
I’m really not sure quite how to capture what just happened. But a major, major player in the conservative/Federalist Society legal establishment in DC just posted a lengthy Twitter thread in which he accuses another alum of Kavanaugh’s high school of assaulting Professor Blasey Ford. (After making the argument he falls back and says he doesn’t know whether the other guy is guilty. But the entire thread is intended to say that he is the culprit and that Kavanaugh is the victim of a wrongful identification.) Read More
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