“something blue.”
Thirteen minutes before Grassley’s final deadline on Saturday, Ford’s lawyers sent a harshly worded email in which they finally agreed to have her testify. On Monday of that week, Katz had declared that Ford was “willing to do whatever is necessary” for the committee to receive the “full story.” By Saturday her position was that although many of Grassley’s offers were “fundamentally inconsistent with the Committee’s promise of a fair, impartial investigation into her allegations, and we are disappointed with the leaks and the bullying that have tainted the process, we are hopeful that we can reach agreement on details.”74 Later that night they agreed to a hearing on Thursday, September 27, at ten o’clock.
It was also announced on Saturday that Michael Bromwich had joined Ford’s legal team. An inspector general under President Clinton, he had recently represented Andrew McCabe, a former deputy director of the FBI and a harsh critic of President Trump who was fired for lying about leaking to reporters.75
On Saturday night, the name of the fourth and final witness surfaced. Surprisingly, it was a female. All previous media reports had been based on Ford’s changing assertions regarding four boys. Ford had told the Washington Post’s Emma Brown that her close and lifelong friend Leland Keyser was one of the four other persons at the party. Though Brown had concealed this from readers, the Judiciary Committee had found it out. Keyser’s attorney, Howard Walsh, responded to an inquiry from the Judiciary Committee: “Simply put, Ms. Keyser does not know Mr. Kavanaugh and she has no recollection of ever being at a party or gathering where he was present, with, or without, Dr. Ford.”76
Later that same evening, Kimberley Strassel, a columnist for the Wall Street Journal, obtained a copy of the email that Emma Brown had sent to Mark Judge hours before her explosive story was published in the Washington Post. In that email, Brown had referred to Keyser, using her maiden name, Ingham, as one of four persons Ford said was at the party. Yet Brown’s story in the Post reported that Ford said there were four boys at the party, an apparent attempt to reconcile Ford’s account with her therapist’s notes: “The notes say four boys were involved, a discrepancy Blasey Ford says was an error on the therapist’s part. Blasey Ford said there were four boys at the party but only two in the room.”77 Were there three boys and one girl at the party or four boys? It was apparent that Ford’s story had changed and that the Post was concealing that change, which would have weakened Ford’s credibility.
The Post scrambled to update its narrative, explaining, “Before her name became public, Ford told The Post she did not think Keyser would remember the party because nothing remarkable had happened there, as far as Keyser was aware.”78
Strassel noted on Twitter, “That is WaPo admitting that it had the name, and had Ford’s response to what would clearly be a Keyser denial, but NEVER PUT IT OUT THERE.”79 It was evident that the newspaper purposely declined to publish Keyser’s name, despite publishing the names of the other alleged witnesses. In fact, Brown had been inside Keyser’s house earlier that week, failing to get confirmation of Ford’s account. Readers were not even told her name or that Ford’s story about four boys was now about three boys and one girl.
Katz rushed to dismiss Keyser’s statement: “It’s not surprising that Ms. Keyser has no recollection of the evening as they did not discuss it. It’s also unremarkable that Ms. Keyser does not remember attending a specific gathering 30 years ago at which nothing of consequence happened to her.”80 Whether a sixteen-year-old girl would forget being abandoned by her friend at a small party with three senior boys, including two varsity football players and the captain of the football team, was in dispute.
It had been quite a week for Christine Blasey Ford. On Sunday, she had exploded onto the scene, identifying four specific persons as having attended that long-ago party. By the following Saturday, all four had denied knowledge of any such gathering.
For Ashley Kavanaugh, life had become surreal. Though she had prayed that her husband not be chosen for the Supreme Court, she had supported him when he was attacked by conservatives who feared that he would be. After he was nominated, she had taken care of the children while he prepared for his hearings. She had quietly endured the indignities of those hearings and tried to