Today, Brett and Christine Blasey Ford testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. She accuses him of sexually assaulting her at a party when she was 15 and he was 17, and he denies it. But there's no question that she's the most credible accuser, and the one with the most compelling evidence. Is it enough to stop a Supreme Court nominee who's been nominated by President Trump? Or is there more to the story than meets the eye? Ben Shapiro explains why the hearings are not going well, and why they should have been designed to do what they were not. Plus, a tip of the iceberg on why the hearing is a disaster, and what Republicans should have done to fix it. Ben Shapiro is on The Ben Shapiro Show with Ben Shapiro, wherever you get your news and information. Check out Ben Shapiro's new book, The Devil Next Door: Inside the White House: The Inside Story of Watergate and the Deep State s Deep State, out now. If you like what you hear, you'll love the Ben Shapiro show! Subscribe to Ben Shapiro s newest podcast, The Dark Side Of. Subscribe on iTunes and leave us a rating and review on iTunes. Rate/subscribe in Apple Podcasts! or wherever else you re listening to podcasts are listening to this podcast. You can also become a supporter of the show by becoming a patron. . Rate, review, and subscribe to our new episodes on Apple Podcast, and other podcasting services! Thank you for supporting the show, Ben Shapiro and other links mentioned in the show. I'll send Ben Shapiro.co/Ben Shapiro's New York Times bestselling books, Thanks for listening and much more! I hope you'll like Ben Shapiro and I'll be checking out Ben's work, too! Ben's New Book Reviewed by you're listening to Ben's new novel "The Dark Side of the Hill" by: by: Ben Shapiro on Yelp on Podchaser Subscribe and Reviewed on Anchor.co , is out on Medium in paperback edition of The Hill? on Good Morning America, Outtro is out! on Tuesday, October 30th, 2019, on Wednesday, October 31st, November 5th, 2020, and so on and so forth, out in Australia, so watch it on Amazon Prime Day, November 7, 2019
00:00:00.000It's Senate Judiciary Committee hearing day for Christine Blasey Ford, one of Brett Kavanaugh's accusers, and Brett Kavanaugh will testify as well.
00:00:15.000Oh yes, we will go wall to wall with all of the latest.
00:00:18.000Suffice it to say, this is not going well for Republicans.
00:00:20.000I will explain why for all of the reasons it is not going well.
00:00:23.000Also, what the actual hearings should have been designed to do and what they actually were not designed to do.
00:00:28.000We'll get to all of that in just one second.
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00:01:38.000Okay, well, today is, of course, the big hearing day, and today is the day in which the Senate Judiciary Committee, after a long last...
00:01:46.000Interviewed Christine Blasey Ford, who is the first accuser against Brett Kavanaugh.
00:01:50.000Now, to stop for just a second before we actually get into the accusations that Christine Blasey Ford made, we should recognize that there have been a number of allegations that have been made, and I want to go through them.
00:02:48.000The big question to me was, is an allegation alone, no matter how credible, without any corroborating evidence whatsoever, is that enough to stop a nomination?
00:02:57.000That's really the question, because no matter how credible a witness is, it's going to be he said, she said, if they're the only people in the room.
00:03:04.000And in this particular case, Christine Blasey Ford had suggested there were other people at a party when she was 15 and Brett Kavanaugh was 17.
00:03:10.000She says that at that party, Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge forced her into a room, turned up the music, and Kavanaugh forced her onto a bed where he attempted to take off her clothes and then placed his hand over her mouth when she tried to scream.
00:03:20.000There's no other witness that has verified this count.
00:03:27.000She says there were other people at the party.
00:03:29.000We'll get into her specific allegations in a moment, including one of her close friends who has denied that she was at any party with Brett Kavanaugh.
00:03:35.000So there is no corroborating evidence.
00:03:40.000So even if she's telling the absolute truth, there is no way to actually corroborate any of her story.
00:03:45.000The reason that matters is because this was happening in a quasi-public setting.
00:03:50.000There should be some corroborating detail.
00:03:52.000If you look at situations involving Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein, there are ways that you can corroborate at least the people who are telling the story at the time.
00:04:00.000As I mentioned on the show, when I was in high school, I've said 15, but I believe I was actually 13 or 14 because it was my sophomore year of high school.
00:04:08.000When I was in high school, I was abused by some kids in my class.
00:04:11.000I remember where it was, I remember who the kids were, and I should be able to lock down the date if I just look at a yearbook or look back at a calendar.
00:04:17.000And I can find people to corroborate the story.
00:04:19.000There's no corroborating evidence here, and Blasey Ford has been unable to really corroborate any of that.
00:04:28.000And so what this comes down to is, is the allegation itself enough?
00:04:32.000If you believe the allegation itself is enough, all that mattered today from the hearing is that Blasey Ford was emotional when she spoke about this because she obviously experienced the trauma and experienced pain.
00:05:25.000But that's why Republicans never should have gotten into this line of questioning in the first place.
00:05:28.000The question always should have been, listen, even if we believe your story, there's no corroborating evidence and we have a denial on the other side.
00:05:34.000That means that there is some burden of proof to come forward with some form of corroborating evidence and you just haven't supplied that.
00:05:40.000Because Republicans didn't do that, the hearing turned into, is Christine Blasey Ford a credible witness?
00:05:47.000And what you'll see is a lot of folks on the right saying she's not credible, she's not believable, because her memory was skewed in other areas.
00:05:52.000But her contention, and I think it's not a completely unfair contention, is, well, I may not have remembered the actual date of this happening, but I certainly remember the feeling of being pushed down on a bed, having a guy jump on top of me, put his hand over my mouth, and I remember his face.
00:06:12.000When bad things happen in your life, you remember the specific bad thing that happened in your life.
00:06:16.000You don't necessarily remember well the surrounding circumstances.
00:06:18.000The problem is there's no way for us to adjudicate whether her memory is faulty or not because there's no corroborating evidence.
00:06:24.000Okay, so that's Christine Blasey Ford.
00:06:25.000I want to mention these other allegations to demonstrate
00:06:28.000But not every allegation necessarily ought to be believed just on the basis of the allegation.
00:06:33.000So Debra Martinez said in a piece in the New Yorker earlier this week on Sunday, the New Yorker reported that Martinez had alleged that Kavanaugh thrust his penis in her face at a frat party at which he was drinking while he was at Yale University.
00:06:46.000But the New Yorker piece is extraordinarily weak.
00:06:49.000According to the publication, she was hesitant to speak publicly because, quote,
00:06:52.000Her memories contained gaps because she had been drinking at the time of the alleged incident, and she was, quote-unquote, reluctant to characterize Kavanaugh's role in the alleged incident with certainty.
00:07:00.000So even she says that she didn't know what happened, this particular accuser, only after, and this is a direct quote from The New Yorker, six days of carefully assessing her memories and consulting with her attorneys did she decide to come forward.
00:07:12.000No corroborating witnesses have come forward.
00:07:14.000Then, yesterday, there was an accusation made by Julie Swetnick, who was a woman brought forward by Michael Avenatti, the lawyer for Stormy Daniels.
00:07:22.000And 2020 Democratic candidate for president.
00:07:24.000And according to her sworn declaration, she saw Kavanaugh get drunk in high school and then grope girls against their will, as well as spiking punch with quaaludes in alcohol and participating in a gang rape line at multiple parties.
00:08:27.000She said when they left the bar, under the influence of alcohol, they were all shocked when Kavanaugh shoved her friend up against the wall very aggressively and sexually.
00:08:33.000There were at least four witnesses, including my daughter.
00:08:48.000What is certainly true is that there is not a court of law in the United States, civil or criminal, that would either convict or punish based on just the allegations alone.
00:08:58.000So, in a country where there is due process, it seems to me that an allegation alone should not be enough to support the destruction of a man's life and a man's career, no matter how credible the person telling the story.
00:09:11.000And this is what Republicans failed to say in the lead up to this hearing.
00:09:14.000Instead, the narrative was put out there that maybe she was lying, or maybe she was politically motivated, but that was never the question.
00:09:21.000We live in a system where due process actually matters.
00:09:24.000And that due process doesn't necessarily apply in the court of public opinion, but if we're going to be intellectually honest about how we actually assess situations, we have to have something beyond a mere allegation.
00:09:35.000Maybe it's that there are multiple allegations, and all the allegations have similar elements, as in the Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein cases.
00:09:40.000Maybe it's that there's corroborating evidence that some of this stuff happened, as with Roy Moore.
00:09:45.000But an allegation alone, it seems to me, is really weak sauce.
00:09:48.000And if that had been the case, nothing in the hearing with Christine Blasey Ford would have changed anything today.
00:09:55.000Because not only did she not provide any corroborating evidence, what she actually showed is that the only memory she seems to hold clearly is the actual incident itself with Kavanaugh.
00:10:04.000Everything else, her memory seems particularly hazy.
00:10:08.000And again, that doesn't answer whether this happened or not.
00:10:11.000And it doesn't even answer whether she is correctly remembering what happened with Kavanaugh or not.
00:10:15.000What it is suggesting is that memory itself is variable.
00:10:19.000And not only that, it suggests that without any other corroborating evidence, which she actually weakened today, right?
00:10:23.000She weakens the possibility of corroborating evidence today.
00:10:26.000She did not strengthen the possibility of corroborating evidence.
00:10:50.000The only thing that changed is that we actually put a face to the accusation.
00:10:53.000If that's the case, then what we really had today was an emotional appeal.
00:10:57.000And listen, I felt the emotional appeal too.
00:11:00.000Because it's hard not to watch a woman who's experiencing pain that she attributes to a dire trauma, right?
00:11:06.000To an incident that any of us would have responded with fury to and say, okay, well, that's now more credible.
00:11:12.000But is it more credible because she said it out loud?
00:11:16.000Is it more, as opposed to credible, does it provide any level of objective verification of the events she speaks of because she said it out loud?
00:11:31.000And I'll explain why it was a loss for Republicans in just a second.
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00:12:51.000And Democrats said, we believe her, she's not lying.
00:12:55.000And what they were hoping to do by that is suggest that anyone who didn't believe her was therefore a sexist and doesn't believe women who are credible.
00:13:03.000Again, the question for this hearing should have been, even if you believe she is not lying, are allegations without any corroborating evidence whatsoever, none, zero, zilch, any corroborating evidence, are those allegations enough to finish a guy's career?
00:13:15.000That's how Republicans should have played this.
00:13:17.000They should have said, we don't know whether to believe her or not.
00:13:20.000We may find her credible, but we can't have a standard of evidence in this country.
00:13:24.000Where people are denied a career and a life based on unverifiable and unverified allegations from a vague time in the past where there should be public witnesses and there are none.
00:13:34.000That's what Republicans should have been arguing.
00:13:36.000Instead, they allowed Democrats to turn this into, is she believable or is she not?
00:13:40.000And the answer is, yeah, she's believable.
00:13:42.000There's nothing about her that suggests that she's not believable.
00:13:48.000And what you'll see is that Republicans had appointed
00:13:52.000A woman named Mitchell, who's a prosecutor, to question her.
00:13:57.000And this woman basically went after the fact that Blasey Ford's memory has lots of holes in different places.
00:14:03.000But Blasey Ford basically defeats all of those attempts with a simple statement, which is, I may not remember everything else in my life, but I remember that time the guy jumped on top of me, put his hand on my mouth and tried to rape me, right?
00:14:28.000Can you help us establish another chain of evidence?
00:14:30.000If Republicans had done that, then maybe this turns into something else.
00:14:34.000Instead, what it turned into is we're supposed to doubt her because of various questions about her history of flying, or we're supposed to doubt her because she has not been completely forthcoming about her polygraph, or stuff like that.
00:16:36.000The same way that I'm sure that I'm talking to you right now.
00:16:39.000It's just basic memory functions and also just the level of norepinephrine and epinephrine in the brain that sort of, as you know, encodes that neurotransmitter, encodes memories into the hippocampus.
00:16:55.000And so the trauma-related experience then is kind of locked there, whereas other details kind of drift.
00:17:02.000So what you are telling us is this could not be
00:17:21.000Okay, so there is where she sort of changed her story.
00:17:24.000But again, it doesn't matter because the Republicans had not established what exactly they were trying to do there.
00:17:29.000And this was part of the problem with the format.
00:17:30.000So you see Blasey Ford said, listen, it's imprinted on my memory that somebody tried to rape me.
00:17:34.000And then she says all the other details were hazy.
00:17:36.000And then when Republicans, the woman questioning is Rachel Mitchell, who is this Republican special counsel, when she pushes back and she says, okay, well,
00:17:44.000What about the fact that you've now changed your story multiple times on how many people were at the party?
00:17:49.000Blasey Ford says, right, I don't remember that stuff so well because that's not when I was being raped, right?
00:17:53.000So she preempted the attack by essentially stating, this is the only thing that I can remember really well.
00:18:29.000And you were the object of the laughter?
00:18:31.000I was, you know, underneath one of them while the two laughed.
00:18:38.000Two friends having a really good time with one another.
00:18:41.000Okay, so this opened a bunch of questions for Republicans, none of which they were willing to take, right?
00:18:46.000They could have called Mark Judge to rebut.
00:18:48.000That's the guy who she claims is in the room with Kavanaugh.
00:18:50.000He's already said under oath that he was not there for any of this and he doesn't know what any of this was, but it would have been worthwhile to question him.
00:18:58.000What Republicans did with this hearing was a huge mistake, because what they did is they basically brought in a special counsel to talk to this accuser.
00:19:07.000They had her ask a question for five minutes, and then they let Democrats grandstand for five minutes.
00:19:11.000And so there was never any line of continuity trying to establish what it was they were trying to establish.
00:19:15.000What should have happened is you got Mitchell out there, says, listen, whether we believe your story or not, and you seem like a credible, very nice person who suffered an awful trauma, we need to try and find some detail we can corroborate here so that we can move forward with the seriousness of the allegations.
00:19:31.000And so now I'm going to ask you a series of questions that are designed to elicit just that sort of corroboration.
00:19:35.000And then at the end you say, okay, well, if we couldn't find corroboration, we can't find corroboration.
00:19:39.000Instead, Republicans started asking questions that went to flaws in her memory, but that don't undermine her central case.
00:19:45.000Meanwhile, Democrats ask questions like, how did it feel when a guy was trying to rape you?
00:19:48.000Who do you think is going to win that PR battle?
00:19:50.000Because that's what this has become, right?
00:20:27.000It scans thousands of resumes, identifies people with the right skills, education, and experience for your job, and actively invites them to apply.
00:21:26.000The, as I say, the way that this was formatted for Republicans was bad, because if they had been trying to establish that there were no corroborating details, and if they had been trying also to establish the Democrats manipulated the process, there were ways to do that.
00:21:39.000Because the truth is, there are holes in Ford's testimony.
00:21:42.000She was asked specifically, for example,
00:21:47.000Because earlier she had said it took place sometime when I was in high school, then she had narrowed it down to the specific summer, and she never really gave an excuse as to why that happened.
00:21:55.000She was specifically asked about whether she gave her psychiatrist's records to the Washington Post, for example, because the first account that she had told of this story to someone, not her husband, was to her psychiatrist.
00:22:07.000This sort of locked it into a timeline back in 2012.
00:22:12.000She's claimed medical privilege on those records.
00:22:14.000She has not handed them over to the actual Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which would kind of be important because you'd want to see if there are discrepancies in her account of the events.
00:22:22.000She hasn't handed those over, but she did hand them to the Washington Post.
00:22:25.000How do we know she handed them to the Washington Post?
00:22:28.000We know she handed them to the Washington Post because it said so in the Washington Post story.
00:22:32.000The Washington Post story explicitly said that she gave her psychiatrist's records to the Washington Post, but when she was asked about it, suddenly she didn't remember, which does raise questions about the capacity of her memory, for example.
00:22:42.000A full or partial set of those marriage therapy records to the Washington Post.
00:23:06.000Speaking of misremembering, we were told last week that Christine Blasey Ford could not show up on Monday for a hearing because Christine Blasey Ford had a fear of flying.
00:23:14.000This was a serious question because in the past week, there have been a bunch of more unverified allegations that have come forward that seem timed by Democrats.
00:23:22.000I mean, it's just a giant coincidence that all these allegations come forward from Monday through Thursday, and they all start breaking in the news this week.
00:23:30.000Well, Blasey Ford's original claim, or at least the claim of her lawyers, is that she couldn't show up on Monday because, number one, she didn't want to be questioned on that side of the country, and number two, she had a fear of flying.
00:23:39.000Well, it turns out that her fear of flying has not prohibited her, I assume she has a fear of flying, but it hasn't stopped her from flying in what she considers important circumstances.
00:23:47.000Circumstances ranging from surf trips, to visiting her family on the East Coast every year, to coming in August
00:23:54.000To Maryland, I think to Delaware, to take a polygraph test.
00:23:58.000So in other words, she flies an awful lot.
00:24:00.000And yet somehow she couldn't fly, but then she did fly to get to this hearing.
00:24:04.000She didn't take a car across the country.
00:24:07.000Well, that raises questions about how Democrats have manipulated the timeline here.
00:24:10.000Again, the person who's been done the most disservice by the Democrats is Blasey Ford.
00:24:14.000She's been under tremendous disservice because let's say that she's telling the absolute 100% truth, it looks manipulative no matter how this was played because Democrats were in fact manipulating the process.
00:24:23.000Dianne Feinstein did not come forward with the allegations for eight weeks.
00:24:26.000Dianne Feinstein did not release it to the FBI.
00:24:28.000Dianne Feinstein did not question Kavanaugh about it, either in public or in private.
00:24:32.000The Democrats turned down a private hearing for Ford.
00:25:24.000So folks on the left were mocking this, like, oh, well, who cares about her flight?
00:25:28.000Well, it goes to the Democratic manipulation of the process, because again, we were told that Democrats just wanted to get down to facts, but it turns out they were delaying the timeline for obviously political reasons.
00:25:37.000All of which still does not go to the key point of this case.
00:25:40.000And I get back to the key point of this case over and over again because I think it really is important, not just for this nomination, which I'll explain what I think is going to happen with it in just a second, but it's also important because of what's going to happen with future nominations.
00:25:53.000Is it enough to have a credible allegation of something bad happening, uncorroborated by a fact?
00:26:05.000It's not just me saying this, by the way.
00:26:06.000Jake Tapper even made this point on CNN last night, that there's no real corroborating evidence for any of this, because it turns out there's no corroborating evidence for any of this.
00:26:15.000By not setting the standard, Republicans really did Kavanaugh a disservice and did themselves a serious disservice.
00:26:21.000Democrats are saying that Kavanaugh obviously should withdraw.
00:26:25.000This in and of itself is sort of self-defeating.
00:26:27.000I'm not sure why they think that he should, like they're saying he should withdraw.
00:26:31.000Why not just call for there to be a vote?
00:26:34.000Why not just put Republicans on the record?
00:26:35.000It seems to me that if Democrats really wanted to put Republicans feet to the fire, they would say, no, he shouldn't withdraw.
00:26:41.000Make Republicans say whether they believe or not.
00:26:42.000That would be the smart political move.
00:26:44.000I don't think President Trump is actually going to pull the nomination.
00:26:48.000The reason I don't think Trump is going to pull the nomination is because
00:26:51.000President Trump tends to believe that accusations by women are very often false.
00:26:55.000He feels he's been victimized by such accusations.
00:26:58.000In some cases, he certainly has not been victimized by some accusations.
00:27:01.000President Trump did a presser yesterday, and here's what he had to say about the situation.
00:27:06.000This, of course, was before the hearing.
00:27:08.000But I've had a lot of false charges made against me, really false charges.
00:27:12.000I know friends that have had false charges.
00:27:15.000People want fame, they want money, they want whatever.
00:27:19.000So when I see it, I view it differently than somebody sitting home watching television where they say, oh, Judge Kavanaugh, this or that.
00:27:27.000So when you say, does it affect me in terms of my thinking?
00:27:33.000Absolutely, because I've had it many times.
00:27:35.000Okay, the reason this is a giant fail is because this is President Trump falling directly into the trap the Democrats have set for him, which is President Trump saying, I've been accused falsely a lot of times, therefore Kavanaugh has been accused falsely a lot of times.
00:27:46.000Except that there are a lot of allegations of President Trump engaging in really bad behavior with women, sexually abusive behavior with women.
00:27:53.000And President Trump was caught on tape, lest we forget, saying he grabs women by the genitals.
00:27:57.000Not the same thing as Brett Kavanaugh, who maintains his complete innocence in all of this.
00:28:02.000But this does set the mindset for the president to not believe any of this.
00:28:07.000And he also, like, I think that if you give President Trump a lie detector test, a polygraph really only detects stress.
00:28:13.000It really detects whether you think you are lying.
00:28:15.000It doesn't detect whether you are telling the truth, but it detects whether you might think you're lying and supposedly raises stress levels, not particularly scientific.
00:28:22.000If you hooked President Trump up to a lie detector, to a polygraph machine, my guess is that everything President Trump says would always pass the lie detector test because he actually believes all the stuff that he says.
00:28:32.000The problem is that he has now set it up, is Ford lying or is she not?
00:28:36.000Well, what this means is I don't think that Trump pulls Kavanaugh's nomination.
00:28:40.000I think Trump leaves Kavanaugh's nomination no matter what happens.
00:28:44.000And Kavanaugh, I can't imagine, is going to be able to rebut the testimony.
00:28:48.000No matter how much sympathy he shows, you can't rebut the testimony of a woman who claims that you were lying on top of her trying to rape her.
00:29:06.000Trump blames squish Republicans for finishing Kavanaugh.
00:29:09.000His base is happy because he didn't pull the nomination and he fights.
00:29:12.000And by the way, I don't think he should pull the nomination because again, I think there should be a standard of corroborative evidence that is presented if we're going to start pulling nominations.
00:29:20.000I don't think Trump pulls the nomination.
00:29:21.000I think he lets this thing go down in flaming defeat.
00:29:23.000I think he nominates Amy Coney Barrett.
00:29:25.000And then Democrats get what they want, which is a referendum in November on whether Republicans should control the next Supreme Court seat.
00:29:31.000If Republicans do not have a majority in November of the Senate, there will be eight people on the Supreme Court from here until 2021.
00:29:38.000Democrats are not going to allow President Trump to fill the seat.
00:29:41.000That's what this has always been about.
00:29:42.000This is always for Democrats, not for Ford, for Democrats.
00:29:45.000This has always been about political manipulation for the press.
00:29:48.000It's been about political manipulation as well.
00:29:50.000There are too many members of the press who have treated allegations as verified facts.
00:29:54.000There are too many members of the press who have treated evidence-free allegations as absolutely
00:32:15.000If Indiana Jones had just chosen the Leftist Tears Hot or Cold Tumblr, if that other guy in Indiana Jones and the Holy Grail had chosen that at the end of the movie, his face wouldn't have melted off and withered.
00:32:24.000Go check it out right now for $99 a year.
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00:32:29.000We have a Sunday special this week featuring Cameron Kasky, someone with whom I disagree a lot on politics, but a 17-year-old kid who's at Parkland and really, I think, is attempting to search for a better politics, so good for him.
00:32:39.000You can listen to that interview this week.
00:33:15.000Well, look at the way that they treated, at least many in the media, not everyone in the media, look at how many in the media treated the Michael Avenatti allegations from yesterday.
00:33:23.000So an allegation comes forward, a woman claims that Brett Kavanaugh was part of a gang rape gang back in high school.
00:33:28.000She said there were tons of witnesses.
00:33:32.000She claims that she went to 10 separate parties at which there were these gang rapes and drugging of women, which does beg the question as to why would you go back?
00:33:42.000I mean, when's the last time you went to a party, you saw a gang rape line and people drugging the punch and you're like, you know what?
00:33:53.000It turns out, by the way, that the woman who makes the accusation was three years older than Brett Kavanaugh, graduated in 1980, which suggests that she was actually a college woman, like a full-grown woman, going to high school parties, watching gang rape lines happen, and then saying nothing, which is weird in and of itself.
00:34:08.000But the way that many in the media treated this was a massive headline.
00:34:10.000It was repeated over and over and over without a lot of these questions being asked.
00:34:15.000I will point out one person who did ask the question.
00:34:16.000CNN's Jake Tapper did grill Michael Avenatti on this, and Avenatti obviously had no answers.
00:34:21.000That, by the way, did not stop Dianne Feinstein from today, in the hearing, suggesting that there are three separate credible allegations against Kavanaugh, which there are not.
00:34:28.000There's one seriously credible allegation against Kavanaugh, in my opinion.
00:34:32.000Even that has no corroborating evidence.
00:34:34.000The other two, from Deborah Ramirez and from the Swetnik,
00:34:39.000I think that those are significantly less credible, the least credible is Swetnick, for precisely the reasons Jake Tapper is about to show you.
00:34:45.000I mean, just to say he was present is a really egregious lack of specificity when you're talking about charges this horrific.
00:34:55.000And I'm not saying that I don't believe them, I'm just saying, what exactly are you saying, or is she saying, that he did?
00:35:02.000Jake, I disagree completely with what you just said.
00:35:31.000It turns out that Avenatti's entire allegation from yesterday begins to fall apart.
00:35:36.000In Miami-Dade County, according to Politico, a Miami-Dade County court docket shows a petition for injunction against Swetnick was filed March 1, 2001, by her former boyfriend, Richard Vennessy, who told Politico the two had dated for four years before they broke up.
00:35:48.000Thirteen days later, the case was dismissed, not long after an affidavit of non-ability to advance fees was filed.
00:35:53.000According to Vinnacy, Swetnick threatened him after they broke up and even after he got married to his current wife and had a child.
00:35:59.000So, he says, this is a direct quote from her former boyfriend, quote,
00:36:24.000Right now, a Supreme Court nominee faces two allegations of sexual assault or misconduct from his time in high school and his time in college back in the late 1980s.
00:36:34.000Kavanaugh denies that they ever happened.
00:36:37.000When Bill Cosby was initially accused, many people for many years could not believe it.
00:36:44.000It took a very long time and a lot of investigating and multiple proceedings before there was a verdict as to the truth of what really happened.
00:36:54.000Okay, so that is not helpful at all, obviously.
00:36:56.000There's no corroborating evidence, but it doesn't matter.
00:37:06.000Obviously, you've got Katie Tour over at MSNBC.
00:37:10.000Who did exactly what Democrats are apt to do, which is suggest that anybody who doubts corroborating evidence says that the accusers are all liars.
00:37:19.000Again, I'm not claiming Deborah Ramirez is a liar.
00:37:21.000I've not claimed in this entire show, or any other show, that Christine Blasey Ford is lying.
00:37:25.000I have said there's not corroborating evidence.
00:37:33.000I feel terrible for these women as well.
00:37:35.000Corroborating evidence is necessary for you to buy an account.
00:37:39.000You can't just buy an account because someone told you the account.
00:37:42.000In just a second, I'm going to play what Katie Turr had to say to Kavanaugh's lawyer, and then I'm going to show you other evidence of the media playing this as politically as humanly possible.
00:37:50.000So, Jeffrey Toobin on CNN, he, he, so we'll get to Toobin in one second.
00:40:30.000My tendency is to believe Christine Blasey Ford's story, but I don't have enough corroborating evidence to finish a guy's career based simply on the allegation.
00:40:39.000By the way, I think there are a lot of folks on the Democratic side who would be more honest if they said the same thing about people like Juanita Broderick.
00:40:44.000When Juanita Broderick accused Bill Clinton of rape, the answer the Democrats gave was, she's not credible.
00:40:51.000What they could have easily said is, well, her story is credible, but there's not enough evidence for me to corroborate it, which is the actual objective truth about things people tell you in real life.
00:41:01.000But when it comes to politics, we all suspend this.
00:41:04.000When it comes to politics, we all suspend the way that we normally work in the realm of the real in order to defend people we like or to target people that we dislike.
00:41:13.000For example, Senator Patty Murray, she comes forward, and again, playing politics, she says that anybody who claims that this is a smear campaign, well, that frightens me as a woman.
00:41:22.000Well, it is a smear campaign by Democrats to bring forward a bunch of unverified allegations with no corroborating evidence.
00:41:39.000From 2012 to 2016, Republicans lost women in droves.
00:41:42.000They've been losing women in droves ever since.
00:41:44.000Democrats know that they can just plow a wedge between men and women on a voting basis if they can credibly accuse Republicans of being sexist.
00:41:52.000That's the game, and Patty Murray is playing it.
00:41:55.000The message that this is a smear campaign frightens me as a woman that, once again, we are saying to women out there, don't come forward.
00:42:03.000You're going to be accused of smear campaigns.
00:42:14.000The worst of all is, of course, Jim Acosta from CNN, who's just a garbage heap.
00:42:17.000I mean, Jim Acosta is just, just awful.
00:42:20.000Yesterday, Jim Acosta asks President Trump at his presser why he doesn't call on a female reporter.
00:42:24.000This is just the worst kind of grandstanding.
00:42:26.000What difference does the question make whether it comes from a female reporter or a male reporter?
00:42:30.000If you put the exact same words in somebody's mouth, you should get the same exact answer, is my opinion, because I treat people as individuals.
00:42:35.000According to Acosta, though, Trump won't call on female reporters because he's a sexist or something.
00:42:40.000If you don't mind, after I'm finished, if Weijia or Hallie or Vivian or one of our female colleagues could go after me, that would be great.
00:42:47.000Mr. President, just to follow up on these allegations against Brett Kavanaugh— What does he mean by that?
00:43:25.000It probably plays out with Kavanaugh going down.
00:43:28.000It probably plays out with Kavanaugh losing the vote, or being withdrawn, and then all hell breaking loose.
00:43:33.000And Democrats proclaiming victory, and Republicans proclaiming that they were stabbed in the back, and things just get uglier.
00:43:39.000Because corroborating evidence doesn't matter, and we're not honest enough to actually set a standard beforehand as to what constitutes evidence that somebody's career should be finished.
00:43:47.000Okay, time for some things I like, and then some things that I hate.
00:44:54.000Just a boy until the day he learns there is evil in the world.
00:45:01.000The movie's terrific, and the score is great, obviously.
00:45:05.000Gregory Peck won Best Actor for his performance in this, which, again, is weird because he didn't do a southern accent, but in any case, the movie's great.
00:45:11.000One of the reasons that I bring up this movie is because the movie is entirely about, or at least the main part of the movie, is about an actual false allegation of rape against a black man by a white woman who was actually sexually abused by her father.
00:45:23.000And the way that the accusation is overridden in the court is not through a he said, she said.
00:45:30.000It's through the fact that Tom Robinson, who's the black man, actually gets up and shows that he was not physically capable of hitting this woman on a particular side of her face because his arm is withered from a cotton gin accident from his youth.
00:45:44.000The point here is that evidence still matters.
00:46:02.000That's the question nobody's going to ask, and it's the only question that in the end really matters for the future of the country when it comes to nominations, due process, or any sort of trial in the court of public opinion.
00:46:11.000Okay, time for a quick thing that I hate.
00:46:17.000So the thing that I hate today, Don Lemon of CNN, again, I've already hit Don Lemon earlier, but he really, he really outdid himself yesterday.
00:46:23.000I don't know, I don't know what he was on yesterday, but it was solid stuff.
00:46:27.000He was talking about Ted Cruz going to a restaurant in Washington, D.C.
00:46:32.000And there, he suggested that Ted Cruz, so what happened is, Ted Cruz goes to the restaurant, a bunch of activists start yelling at Ted Cruz about Kavanaugh, and he is forced to leave the restaurant with his wife.
00:46:43.000Here is Don Lemon explaining why this is totally cool.
00:46:46.000I don't like it, but it is one reason I'm not a public official, that I'm not running for office.
00:46:55.000In a way, I think it goes with the territory.
00:46:56.000I don't like that they were blocking his wife.
00:46:57.000But that's what he signed up for, and as a strict constitutionalist, which Ted Cruz is, he knows that it's protected under the First Amendment.
00:47:43.000But according to Don Lemon, apparently, they do.
00:47:46.000The other thing I have to say that I hate today, Jeet here is a
00:47:50.000An alleged journalist over the Atlantic and he tweeted this out in the aftermath of some allegations that were that were dumped yesterday.
00:47:57.000So Senate Republicans on the Judiciary Committee released a Kavanaugh investigative summary that included an anonymous claim of rape forward by Kamala Harris's office that turned out to be complete nonsense.
00:48:09.000Two interviews and a written statement from a man who believes that he, not Kavanaugh, actually was responsible for the assault.
00:48:33.000Put aside Blasey Ford, who again has no corroboration for her statements.
00:48:37.000This week, we've seen several attempts at muddying the waters coming from Michael Avenatti, coming from The New Yorker, all of it uncorroborated, all of it raw gossip intent at muddying the waters, but apparently it only applies to one side of the aisle.
00:48:48.000This is what's so irritating about all of this.
00:48:49.000None of this is really an attempt to get down to who should be on the Supreme Court or standards of proof.
00:48:54.000None of this is really an attempt to get down to even the basic truth of what happened because there's no way to do that without corroborating evidence.
00:49:00.000All of this is political and anybody who tells you difference is lying to your face.
00:49:03.000We will be back here tomorrow with all of the fallout because I'm sure it will be magnificent in its horror.