arrived from complete strangers expressing concern for the family or the mountains of supportive letters that Ashley would reread when she needed encouragement.
As the scrutiny escalated, the Kavanaughs looked forward to their chance to tell their side of the story. But it was not clear that Ford even planned to show up at the hearing on Thursday. Even Senator Feinstein said she had “no way of knowing” if Ford would appear, reluctant as she was to be questioned by the Republicans’ outside counsel.53
The Republicans said they were willing to keep the Senate in session all weekend to confirm Kavanaugh as quickly as possible, and the Judiciary Committee announced that it would vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination at 9:30 on Friday morning, just over a week after the vote was originally to have been taken.54 Republicans hoped that the aggressive schedule could put Kavanaugh on the Court in time for the first oral arguments of the 2018 term the following Monday.
Democrats and their media allies continued to call for an FBI investigation. Republicans got a public relations break when researchers found footage of then–Judiciary Committee chairman Joe Biden downplaying the significance of FBI investigations during the Thomas-Hill hearings. Anita Hill’s allegations, unlike Ford’s, had been duly submitted to the White House before being shopped to the media, allowing the FBI to investigate before sources were influenced by news reports. The FBI had conducted several interviews and within three days given its results to the White House, which shared them with the Senate. Both the White House and the Senate had concluded from the FBI’s report that the allegations were not worth pursuing, but then they were leaked to the media.
When Republicans cited the FBI report as a reason not to delay Thomas’s confirmation, Biden fired back, “The next person that refers to an FBI report as being worth anything, obviously doesn’t understand anything. FBI explicitly does not, in this or any other case, reach a conclusion. Period. Period. . . . So when people wave an FBI report before you, understand they do not, they do not, they do not reach conclusions.”55
He was correct, of course. As both Senator Grassley and the Department of Justice had already pointed out, the task of the FBI background checkers was not to identify crimes or other wrongdoing but to collect statements from acquaintances, colleagues, neighbors—anyone who might know something about the allegation.56 It was for the White House and the Senate to weigh the testimony collected by the FBI and decide what to do with it. And a Senate investigation carried the same assurances of confidentiality and criminal penalties for lying as an FBI investigation did.
But the powerful rhetorical value of appealing to the FBI was not lost on the Democrats, so as annoyed as they were for Joe Biden to be deployed again as the Republicans’ spokesman on judicial issues, they kept the FBI drumbeat going.
On Wednesday morning, September 26, the day before Ford and Kavanaugh were to appear before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Michael Avenatti released what he said was a sworn affidavit from his client Julie Swetnick.57 After stating her current and former security clearances, she detailed allegations against Kavanaugh and Mark Judge that were far worse than anything that had been alleged before.
She said she attended “well over 10” house parties in the early 1980s at which Kavanaugh and the ubiquitous Judge drank heavily and sexually assaulted women. Echoing Kavanaugh’s college roommate, she said she personally witnessed him behave as a “mean drunk” and sexually demean women. She said she also saw him behave this way in Ocean City, Maryland. Kavanaugh’s claims of sexual innocence in high school were “absolutely false and a lie.”
The affidavit seemed designed as an excuse to question Mark Judge. “There is no question in my mind that Mark Judge has significant information concerning the conduct of Brett Kavanaugh during the 1980s, especially as it related to his actions toward women.” Echoing other allegations in Farrow and Mayer’s New Yorker article, Swetnick said Kavanaugh and Judge attempted to spike punch with drugs and alcohol and that she witnessed them target vulnerable girls at these parties.
It kept getting worse: “I also witnessed efforts by Mark Judge, Brett Kavanaugh, and others to cause girls to become inebriated and disoriented so they could be “gang raped” in a side room or bedroom by a ‘train’ of numerous boys. I have a firm recollection of seeing boys lined up outside rooms at many of these parties waiting for their ‘turn’ with