she wanted him, Harris warned the judge dramatically, “Be sure about your answer, sir.”
Kavanaugh was utterly confused. While he didn’t think he even knew anyone at the Kasowitz firm, he was alert to the danger of a perjury trap. “Is there a person you’re talking about?” Kavanaugh asked haltingly.
“I’m asking you a very direct question,” Harris snapped. “Yes or no?”
“I don’t know everyone that works at that firm,” Kavanaugh said.
Implying that she had damaging information, the senator said, “I think you’re thinking of someone and you don’t want to tell us.”
A Democratic staffer told reporters that they had reason to believe Kavanaugh had had conversations with people at Kasowitz’s firm, and a compliant press ran with the story that the nominee appeared to have committed perjury.34 “Kavanaugh Stumbles,” read the headline in Politico.35 “Harris Lands First Blow on Kavanaugh,” announced Roll Call.36 The coverage of Harris herself verged on fawning. The Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin gushed about a “break-out moment” that showed “her prosecutorial skill” and made her “an instant Democratic heroine.” She opined further, “Kavanaugh looked confused, if not nervous. He hadn’t seen this coming.”37
But in fact he had seen it coming, which was why he was so cautious. Senator Ted Cruz had warned him that Democrats would try to trick him into inconsistencies. In other lines of questioning, Kavanaugh had responded with marked openness. Being on offense was part of his strategy from the beginning. While he followed the Ginsburg precedent of not giving his views on particular cases, he eagerly engaged even the most hostile questioner. He was happy to talk at length about the Federalist Papers, his own decisions, the doctrine of stare decisis—anything but how he would vote in a specific case. He was not a man of one-sentence answers. But he recognized that Harris was trying to lay a perjury trap. It didn’t matter that her questions would have been unacceptable and unethical in a courtroom. He had to be careful not to say anything that could be perceived as untrue. Who knew who might have just been hired at Kasowitz, Benson & Torres?
It turned out that Kavanaugh had not talked to anyone at Kasowitz, Benson & Torres, and Harris never offered any evidence of such a conversation. The White House had set up a war room down the hall from the hearing room, manned by Kavanaugh’s team, where they quickly determined that Harris must have been fishing for conversations with Edward McNally, a partner in the firm’s New York office who had worked in the Bush White House when Kavanaugh did. They tracked him down and confirmed that Kavanaugh had not spoken to him about the Mueller investigation. The law firm itself denied that any of its personnel had spoken to Kavanaugh, and the judge then testified under oath that the answer to Senator Harris’s question was a straightforward “no.”
Senator Whitehouse had an ax to grind against “shadowy dark-money front groups” participating in the judicial appointment process. “Here’s how the game works,” he said in his opening statement. “Big business and partisan groups fund the Federalist Society, which picked Gorsuch and now you.”
He went on:
Then big business and partisan groups fund the Judicial Crisis Network, which runs dark-money political campaigns to influence senators in confirmation votes, as they’ve done for Gorsuch and now for you. Who pays millions of dollars for that and what their expectations are is a deep, dark secret. These groups also fund Republican election campaigns with dark money and keep the identity of donors a deep, dark secret. And of course, 90 percent of your documents are, to us, a deep, dark secret.
Behind him his aides hoisted a sign stating that JCN had spent $17 million in connection with the Garland and Gorsuch nominations.38
Whitehouse’s horror at the Federalist Society had arisen suddenly. Like every sitting justice of the Supreme Court, he himself had spoken at an event hosted by the Federalist Society.39 His outrage over “dark money”—a pejorative term for donations made according to section 501(c)(4) of the Internal Revenue Code, which does not require an organization to disclose the identity of its donors—was similarly selective. The League of Conservation Voters, a 501(c)(4) organization and “dark money heavyweight,” according to the Center for Public Integrity, used its PAC to endorse Whitehouse and was his single largest donor.40
Senator Whitehouse told only half the story. In an article in Politico in January 2019, “Why There’s No Liberal Federalist Society,” the law professor Evan Mandery bemoaned how sophisticated the conservative legal network