US President Donald Trump shakes hands with US Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh before delivering the State of the Union address at the US Capitol in Washington, DC, on February 5, 2019.
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“At least seven people” were aware of the story that Brett Kavanaugh had drunkenly exposed his penis to an unwilling Yale classmate, who ended up touching it while trying to avoid him, the New York Times reported. In an excerpt from their forthcoming book, The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation, Times reporters Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly wrote that Deborah Ramirez’s account of being confronted by the future Supreme Court justice’s penis—an incident that Kavanaugh’s supporters dismissed as uncorroborated during his 2018 confirmation hearings—was supported by their later reporting:
Pogrebin and Kelly wrote:
During his Senate testimony, Mr. Kavanaugh said that if the incident Ms. Ramirez described had occurred, it would have been “the talk of campus.” Our reporting suggests that it was.
In addition, their investigation turned up a witness to a second, previously unreported incident in which Kavanaugh was said to have brandished his penis, at a different party:
A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student. Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the F.B.I. about this account, but the F.B.I. did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly. (We corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier.)
Unlike Christine Blasey Ford, who said Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her in high school, Ramirez did not testify in the confirmation hearings. With the Republican majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee focused on pushing Kavanaugh through, Pogrebin and Kelly reported, the investigation into claims against Kavanaugh failed to follow up on dozens of possible leads:
Ms. Ramirez’s legal team gave the F.B.I. a list of at least 25 individuals who may have had corroborating evidence. But the bureau — in its supplemental background investigation — interviewed none of them, though we learned many of these potential witnesses tried in vain to reach the F.B.I. on their own.
Two F.B.I. agents interviewed Ms. Ramirez, telling her that they found her “credible.” But the Republican-controlled Senate had imposed strict limits on the investigation. “‘We have to wait to get authorization to do anything else,’” Bill Pittard, one of Ms. Ramirez’s lawyers, recalled the agents saying. “It was almost a little apologetic.”
In addition to taking his lifetime seat on the Supreme Court, by the fall of last year, Kavanaugh had returned to coaching girls’ basketball.
