During Brett Kavanaugh’s Senate testimony last week, Orrin Hatch asked the prospective Supreme Court justice, “When did you first hear of Ms. Ramirez’s allegations against you?” Kavanaugh replied, “In the last — in the period since then, the New Yorker story.” Hatch was referring to Deborah Ramirez’s charge that Kavanaugh humiliated her by waving his penis in her face while she was intoxicated. Kavanaugh appeared to be saying he heard of the charges after they appeared in The New Yorker in September.
NBC reports that this, like many things Kavanaugh said in his testimony, is false. Kavanaugh’s friends gathered testimony attempting to refute Ramirez’s allegations weeks before The New Yorker’s story was published. Some of the witnesses were contacted by people working on Kavanaugh’s behalf as early as July, according to text messages one witness has shared with the FBI.
This demonstrates to a near-certainty that Kavanaugh knew about the incident weeks before the story came to light. It is possible he had somehow heard about false charges being circulated in advance, worked to refute them, and then misled the Senate about when he heard about them. An alternative, more direct explanation would be that he worked to refute the charge because he knew about it from having actually done what he was accused of.
In any case, the FBI investigation is still in its early stages, it has now been freed from the shackles Trump had initially placed on it, and Kavanaugh is defending an account that does not add up.
