The Trump White House ensured that the Kavanaugh “investigation” went nowhere

In 2018, in the tense hours following then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's meeting with Dr. Christine Blasey Ford stated About Kavanaugh's alleged sexual assault on Ford some thirty years earlier, members of the Senate Judiciary Committee reached a compromise. The FBI, which had already completed its standard background investigation into Kavanaugh, would have another week to conduct a second, “supplementary” investigation into “current credible allegations” against him. Sen. Jeff Flake of Arizona, the only Republican on the committee to support delaying the final confirmation vote until then, said the Senate has a solemn obligation to “exercise due diligence on such an important nomination.”

Publicly, President Donald Trump described the FBI's additional investigation as comprehensive, thorough and, above all, independent. The office, he said, “talks to everyone” and has “free rein to do whatever it needs to do.” Agents, he said, can interview “anyone they deem appropriate, at their discretion” and “anyone they want, within reason.” White House officials reiterated that message, telling reporters that Trump “let the FBI agents do what they are trained to do” and that the investigation was being conducted “by the book.”

As detailed in a new one report From Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, these promises were outrageous lies, even in Trump-friendly terms. What this “by-the-book” language obscures is the fact that the FBI does not have a “playbook” for conducting these supplemental ad hoc investigations, meaning that in practice the Trump administration wrote it on the fly. Behind the scenes, the White House exercised tight control over the investigation, authorizing the FBI to interview 10 specific people and denying access to everyone else – including dozens of former classmates and friends of Kavanaugh, Ford and Kavanaugh's second accuser, Debbie Ramirez , whose names her lawyers provided to the FBI.

In some cases, the White House has even dictated the permissible scope of questioning of certain witnesses. Notably, Kavanaugh and Ford were not included on the list, as both appear to be high-priority interlocutors when it comes to getting to the bottom of things seriously.