Con Job Complete: FBI Kavanaugh Background Redux

Con Job Complete:  FBI Kavanaugh Background Redux

We know that Trump likes to limit and end investigations by complaining about their few million dollar costs.  They are, after all, a fraction of Trump’s yearly expenses flying to one of his golf courses every weekend.   Thus, Trump decided to save money on the Kavanaugh background investigation by only printing ONE COPY for the Senate to read, and limiting its viewing to just one day.  

Trump also saved money by limiting the FBI to only nine interviews, and less than a week of interviews.  The interviews also were not allowed to spend time learning about Judge Kavanaugh’s excessive drinking habits.

The White House will not tell us what the limits on the interviews were.  Nobody has even raised the question of whether the White House altered or cut the report.

Only 10 Senate staff are allowed to view the report, in addition to the Senators.  Democrats and Republicans alternate hours to review the report.  Republicans got the first hour.  A member of the staff reads the report to the group.

This reminds me of Sabbath services in my childhood Conservative Synagogue.  There was only one Torah, closely locked up at all other times in the Torah’s ark.  Only one person could read the Torah at a time.  You could not hold services unless there was a minion of 10 men to guard it, when it came out of its ark.

Unfortunately for me, the Torah was of course written in Hebrew.  What was even more difficult, was that in ancient Hebrew they did not attach the vowel symbols, so you had to know the words just from the consonants, and add the vowels yourself.  Consequently, my Bar Mitzvah Torah reading was really just a memorization and singing of a tape in Hebrew.  

The point of the Bar Mitzvah at age 13 is that it signifies that you have become a man.  That actually has a marked effect at making you responsible for your behavior as a teenager, in contrast to Kavanaugh and his friends.  It also allowed you to become one of the 10 men in the minion, to guard the Torah.

The statements from the majority senators about the FBI report sound pretty much like the singsong that I memorized, without much time to have read the report, or being able to known what the restrictions on the interviews and interviewees were.  The Democrats had supplied more than 40 people to be interviewed, instead of just 9.

Over 1,700 law professors have signed a letter saying that Judge Kavanaugh does not have the judicial restraint, the impartiality, or the judicial temperament to be a Supreme Court Justice.  They come from 160 law schools.

About Dennis SILVERMAN

I am a retired Professor of Physics and Astronomy at U C Irvine. For two decades I have been active in learning about energy and the environment, and in reporting on those topics for a decade. For the last four years I have added science policy. Lately, I have been reporting on the Covid-19 pandemic of our times.
This entry was posted in 2018 Midterm Election, Donald Trump, Kavanaugh, Trump Administration, White House. Bookmark the permalink.

Leave a Reply