In New Report Into FBI’s Half-Baked Kavanaugh Probe, Thomas-Hill Parallels Abound

The two cases already drew obvious parallels, 30 years apart: Men are nominated for the Supreme Court, their elevation prompts revelations of alleged past harms done to multiple women, Republicans go into total-war mode to smear the women and defend their nominees, Democrats and the FBI fail to protect the women or disqualify the nominees. 

But perhaps the most striking parallel between the accusations against Brett Kavanaugh and Clarence Thomas, revealed in a new Senate report on the FBI’s 2018 “investigation” into Kavanaugh’s behavior, are the witnesses — with the potential to sink the nominations — who were silenced.

“Democratic members of the Senate Judiciary Committee also individually contacted the FBI to provide names of people with potentially corroborating or otherwise relevant information who had reached out after trying — but failing — to get in touch with FBI investigators,” the report read. 

The FBI received over 4,500 tips on Kavanaugh during its investigation, but only interviewed 10 people (omitting both Kavanaugh and his first public accuser, Christine Blasey Ford), per the report. These may have included more critical information like that provided by Max Stier, who could not reach the FBI investigators and would later tell the New York Times about a dorm party where Kavanaugh drunkenly pulled down his pants and his friends thrust his genitals into the hand of a female student — strikingly similar to the testimony of Deborah Ramirez, which the FBI dismissed as “uncorroborated.” 

Few people remember today (if they were ever told) that Anita Hill, too, was far from alone in her historic testimony about Thomas’ workplace stalking and harassment. 

Angela Wright, a former Equal Employment Opportunity Commission employee under Thomas, flew to Washington D.C. during the hearings under subpoena, prepared to tell the committee about her experience with Thomas hounding her for dates, calling her leg hair “sexy,” asking for her bra size at a farewell banquet for a coworker, coming to her apartment at night, uninvited. 

“The thrust of my concerns at this point was to not watch a woman — who I believed in my gut to be telling the truth about a man who I believe to be totally capable of doing what she said he did — the thrust of my concern was not to watch her become victimized, when I knew of similar situations that I had had with Mr. Thomas,” Wright told the Senate Judiciary committee staffers, as part of testimony which would be included later in a committee report that basically no one read. 

She sat in a Virginia hotel room for three days, and was never called to speak before committee members. 

And she wasn’t alone. Rose Jourdain, a former elderly speechwriter at the EEOC, had been Wright’s confidant and was sitting in a hospital room, ready to confirm her allegations. 

Sukari Hardnett, Thomas’s former special assistant at the EEOC, wrote a letter to the committee after trying to reach out with relevant information and being ignored, telling them that all the Black women who worked for Thomas knew they were “being auditioned,” that they could embrace the harassment and be “summoned constantly” or rebuff it and be treated as a “leper.” Her own attempt to transfer away from his attentions left her an “outcast” for the rest of her time at the agency, she wrote. 

All three women expected to testify; none did. Their accusations were buried in an enormous committee report that even some of its members didn’t read until Thomas was already confirmed. In both cases, corroborating witnesses were silenced and excluded, leaving Ford and Hill alone to be smeared, threatened and discredited.

There are many galling things about the new report, published six years after Kavanaugh’s confirmation: Donald Trump’s White House’s brazen and successful efforts to curtail the investigation, the many Republican senators citing the FBI report to justify their vote for Kavanaugh, the Biden White House’s reluctance to cooperate with Senate Democrats, which prolonged the probe even further. 

Biden has said that he believes Wright’s televised testimony, in addition to Hill’s, would have sunk Thomas’ nomination. It’s infuriating to imagine what the corroborating information contained in those 4,500 tips would have done to Kavanaugh — as he and Thomas sit side-by-side on the nation’s highest court, enjoying a lifetime tenure.

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