Back when then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh was undergoing his Senate confirmation hearing in 2018, the FBI set up a tip line to field information regarding the mounting sexual assault and misconduct claims piling up against him.
We already knew that the FBI didn’t investigate a number of these tips, even those made first-hand by the accusers themselves. We’ve known from the start that the “investigation” that laid a clear path to Kavanaugh’s confirmation was a total sham. But I guess there’s something comforting about finally hearing it confirmed by the head of the FBI himself.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, a Democrat from Rhode Island, has been hounding FBI Director Christopher Wray about the investigation process for years. He raised questions about the tip line and what was done with that information in 2019. In March of 2021, he sent a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland, asking the Department of Justice to investigate the investigation, which he called “fake.”
This week, Whitehouse finally got Wray—who somehow still has his job—to admit that the FBI did not investigate the tips that came in. Rather, they “reviewed” them, but only to separate out the relevant ones about Kavanaugh. They then sent those tips to the Trump White House, to do with whatever they pleased, which definitely didn’t include any sort of investigation.
Whitehouse asked Wray if it was true that “after Kavanaugh-related tips were separated from other tips, that they were forwarded to White House counsel without investigation?” Here’s the exchange that followed (via Esquire):
WRAY: When it comes to the tip line, we wanted to make sure the White House had all the information we had, so when the hundreds of calls started coming it, we gathered those up, reviewed them and provided them to the White House—
WHITEHOUSE: Without investigation?
WRAY: We reviewed them and then provided them to the White House.
WHITEHOUSE: You reviewed them for the purposes of separating from tip line traffic but did not further investigate the ones that related to Kavanaugh, correct?
WRAY: Correct.
Wray also admitted that, as Whitehouse put it, “the FBI took direction from the White House as to whom the FBI would question.”
Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court confirmation, like so much of Trump’s presidency, was just a total scam from top to bottom.
(image: Andrew Harnik – Pool/Getty Images)
