press, relying on anonymous reports from the Ford camp, had reported. It also highlighted her fragility.
Mitchell asked how Ford came to the East Coast in the summer. “In an airplane,” she answered. “In fact, you fly fairly frequently for your hobbies, and you’ve had to fly for your work. Is that true?” Mitchell pushed. “Correct, unfortunately,” Ford replied.
Then, citing a consulting position Ford had with a company in Australia, Mitchell asked about travel there. Ford was quick to say she had never been there, suggesting it was too long a journey for her to endure in an airplane. “I don’t think I’ll make it to Australia!”
Mitchell kept going, noting that Ford had indicated an interest in “surf travel,” specifically identifying Hawaii, Costa Rica, the South Pacific Islands, and French Polynesia as places where she had pursued this hobby.14 Asked if she had ever been to those places, Ford said “correct.” Mitchell also asked if Ford had traveled by air in pursuit of her interests in oceanography and in Hawaiian and Tahitian culture. Ford admitted she had. The more than four-thousand-mile flight from Palo Alto to French Polynesia is completely over the Pacific Ocean.
Mitchell also inquired about Ford’s seeming not to know about the repeated offers to interview her in California: “Was it communicated to you by your counsel or someone else that the committee had asked to interview you and that they offered to come out to California to do so?”
At that point, Ford’s attorneys jumped. “We’re going to object, Mr. Chairman, to any call for privileged conversations between counsel and Dr. Ford.”
Grassley asked if the counsel could confirm that the offer had been made. Ford interjected that she “wasn’t clear on what the offer was” and would have been happy to have them come out.
Mitchell then turned to the polygraph test that Ford had taken on August 7, asking how she had decided to take it. Her attorneys again objected, “You’re seeming to call for communications between counsel and client.” But Ford answered that she’d done so on the advice of attorneys, that she had no idea who paid for it, and that she had taken the polygraph on the day of her grandmother’s funeral or maybe the day after, just before a flight to New Hampshire. She could not remember many details from the August 7 polygraph.
Continuing with that subject, Mitchell asked, “Have you ever had discussions with anyone, beside your attorneys, on how to take a polygraph?” Ford: “Never.”
“Have you ever given tips or advice to somebody who was looking to take a polygraph test?” Ford replied, “Never.”
As the Judiciary Committee recessed for lunch, the media continued in the same tenor as earlier. On CNN, Jeffrey Toobin reminded viewers that Mark Judge had written a book about his notoriously drunken youth and surmised that Republicans didn’t want him to testify because he would be such a bad witness. “It just underlines how badly this has all gone for the Kavanaugh side in this hearing so far,” he said, inviting viewers to “dwell for a moment” on how “ineffective this cross-examination has been.”15 Gloria Borger noted that the procedure allowed for no defense of Kavanaugh; it would be “all on” him to repair the damage that was being done.
NBC’s Savannah Guthrie acknowledged that Mitchell had “scored some points here and there,” including the shocking admission that the woman the media had depicted as afraid to fly actually flew regularly.16 Megyn Kelly, repeating the maxim that prosecutors should never ask a question to which they do not already know the answer, was critical of Mitchell, who had “gone fishing a couple of times and come up with nothing.”17
Kelly was mistaken. Mitchell knew more than outsiders realized, and the committee staff could see what she had caught. The question about polygraph coaching might have looked like a fishing expedition, but investigators had already talked to a witness—a former boyfriend of Ford’s—who said she had coached a friend preparing to submit to a polygraph test. If that witness was telling the truth, Ford had just lied under oath. Interestingly enough, the woman he had identified as the recipient of the coaching—Monica McLean—was not only in the hearing room but had walked in from the holding area with Ford and her attorneys.
Still, Kelly said, “There has been no Perry Mason moment.”18
Outside observers were convinced that the day was already a disaster for Kavanaugh. Steve Schmidt, an advisor to Republicans such as George W. Bush and John McCain, said, “Every GOP campaign strategist