• “One of the finest people that anybody has known.” That’s President Trump’s verdict on Brett Kavanaugh, his Supreme Court nominee and alleged perpetrator of sexual assault.
• But Trump’s also open to “a little delay” in the Senate’s voting on Kavanaugh. Though that’s only because:
I want the American people to be happy because they’re getting somebody that is great. I want him to go in at the absolute highest level. And I think to do that you have to go through this.
• Which is notably different than, say, this:
This week’s Judiciary Committee vote on Judge Kavanaugh should be delayed. This is not a difficult decision. The fact is that Senators have new information about a potential crime committed by a Supreme Court nominee and an accuser who has come forward.
https://t.co/rGL7ebLwDM
— Senator Patty Murray (@PattyMurray) September 17, 2018
• Time for a big, distracting something? How about this!
JUST IN: Trump has just ordered DNI & DOJ to declassify classified portions of Carter Page’s FISA application & FBI reports of interviews with Bruce Ohr. Plus unredacted Russia investigation-related texts of James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Bruce Ohr. pic.twitter.com/Uqr1RmrGg1
— Jeremy Diamond (@JDiamond1) September 17, 2018
• Hillary Clinton has written an essay for The Atlantic taking on Trump and proclaiming American democracy to be “in crisis,” which is sure to be received well on Trump’s Twitter feed.
It’s been nearly two years since Donald Trump won enough Electoral College votes to become president of the United States. On the day after, in my concession speech, I said, “We owe him an open mind and the chance to lead.” I hoped that my fears for our future were overblown.
They were not.
• And is this the next Kavanaugh bomb to drop? The Intercept, which was part of making the current Kavanaugh accusation public, now reports:
The top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee were both approached in July by an attorney claiming to have information relevant to the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. The attorney claimed in his letter that multiple employees of the federal judiciary would be willing to speak to investigators, but received no reply to multiple attempts to make contact, he told The Intercept.
Cyrus Sanai made his first attempt to reach out to Sens. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., in a letter dated July 24.
Sanai told the committee leadership that “there are persons who work for, or who have worked for, the federal judiciary who have important stories to tell about disgraced former Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, and his mentee, current United States Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.”
• Oh, and presidential son, Donald Trump Jr., “posted a meme on Instagram making fun of the woman who alleges that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were high school students,” reports HuffPo. Which makes the son-of-Trump just about as classy as Missouri Republican Congressman Billy Long.
It’s been 605 days since, in Hillary Clinton’s words from that Atlantic essay, Trump began sinking “far below the already-low bar he set for himself in his ugly campaign.”
