When Christine Blasey Ford rocked now-Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination hearing in 2018 by publicly testifying that he groped and sexually abused her at a party 30 years earlier, then-president Donald Trump claimed that the FBI would fully investigate sexual misconduct allegations against him.
That investigation had serious flaws, according to a report released Tuesday by a top Senate Democrat.
Though Trump claimed the agency was “talking to everybody” and had “free rein to do whatever they have to do,” the newly released report, “Unworthy of Reliance: The Flawed Supplemental Background Investigation Into Sexual-Assault Allegations Against Justice Brett Kavanaugh,” argues otherwise.
The report was authored by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island Democrat who sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee.
The FBI produced nothing when asked to show “written protocols” it had in place to investigate the abuse claims, according to the report, which relies on interviews, internal FBI documents and some 500 pages of correspondence between the agency and the Trump White House.
The report notes that in 2018, it was public knowledge that the FBI had never directly questioned Ford or Kavanagh directly about the misconduct claims and attorneys for Ford and provided the FBI “with dozens of names of additional witnesses whom the attorneys said could corroborate” Ford’s claims, the report found.
But these leads were never fully pursued. In the end, the FBI conducted just 10 interviews.
Democrats sent a list of the names of witnesses they thought the FBI should look into in October 2018. One of those witnesses was a former college classmate of Kavanaugh’s, and he eventually contacted a U.S. senator because he couldn’t reach anyone at the FBI who would collect his information, the report claims.
Many people resorted to using the FBI’s generic tip line ― no dedicated tip line existed for the Kavanaugh probe ― and the agency received some 4,500 tips, including phone calls and electronic submissions.
“None were investigated or even screened for indicia of credibility,” the report states.
On Oct. 4, 2018, the FBI presented lawmakers with over 1,600 pages of material on Kavanaugh, mostly from its tip line, “which was laid out in piles on the tables.” Two days later, the Senate confirmed Kavanaugh for his Supreme Court seat.
Debra Katz and Lisa Banks, attorneys for Ford, said the congressional report “confirms what we long suspected.”
“The FBI supplemental investigation of then-nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh was, in fact, a sham effort directed by the Trump White House to silence brave victims and other witnesses who came forward and to hide the truth,” Katz and Banks said Tuesday, adding that Ford performed a “heroic act of public service that came at a steep personal cost for her and those closer to her.”
“We know today that Trump White House officials acted to hide the truth,” Katz and Banks said.
A spokesperson for Kavanaugh did not immediately return a request for comment.
Whitehouse, a long time and fierce critic of Kavanaugh, didn’t mince words Tuesday.
The lawmaker said he had promised Ford — as well as Deborah Ramirez, a woman who publicly alleged Kavanaugh assaulted her by shoving his genitals in her face at a party in the 1980s — that he would “keep digging for however long it took” to conduct a “full, proper” investigation of their claims and any others that surfaced.
The release of the final report has taken so long, according to the senator, because of the Trump administration’s “reluctance to answer even basic questions” when the probe began in 2018. But the Biden White House was sometimes also slow to respond, the report notes.
The Trump White House, the report says, authorized the agency to make only “narrow requests for a small number of limited-inquiry interviews.” FBI officials asked the Trump administration for “additional guidance,” but got no further instruction.
An FBI spokesperson told HuffPost in an email Tuesday that it responds to requests from the Office of White House Counsel and other agencies to conduct background investigations of candidates for certain positions.
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“We have consistently followed that process for decades and did so for the Kavanaugh inquiry. The FBI does not have the independent authority to expand the scope of a supplemental background investigation outside the requesting agency’s parameters,” the spokesperson said.
The limits placed on the investigation by the Trump administration, coupled with a “lack of FBI investigative standards, helped the Trump White House thwart meaningful investigation of the allegations against Kavanaugh, denying Senators information needed to fulfill their constitutional duties,” Whitehouse said.
“The FBI must create real protocols so Senators and the American people get real answers — not manufactured misdirection — the next time serious questions about a nominee emerge late in the confirmation process,” he added.
Need help? Visit RAINN’s National Sexual Assault Online Hotline or the National Sexual Violence Resource Center’s website.
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