Neil Gorsuch, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, left, and Brett Kavanaugh, associate justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, attend the U.S. President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Tuesday, Feb. 5, 2019.
Doug Mills | Bloomberg | Getty Images
President Donald Trump said that Justice Brett Kavanaugh should “start suing people” or the Department of Justice “should come to his rescue” on Sunday in response to an article in The New York Times that surfaced a previously unreported allegation of sexual misconduct from the justice’s time as an undergraduate at Yale University.
“The lies being told about him are unbelievable. False Accusations without recrimination. When does it stop? They are trying to influence his opinions. Can’t let that happen!” Trump wrote in a post on Twitter.
In another post, the president wrote that “the Radical Left Democrats and their Partner, the LameStream Media, are after Brett Kavanaugh again, talking loudly of their favorite word, impeachment.”
“They want to scare him into turning Liberal!” Trump wrote.
The tweets followed a report in The New York Times, published Saturday evening, which was written by the two authors of a new book about the sexual misconduct allegations that dogged Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings last year. The authors wrote that they had uncovered an instance of sexual misconduct that did not publicly emerge in those hearings.
The two authors, Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, wrote that one of Kavanaugh’s classmates at Yale notified senators and the FBI that he had witnessed Kavanaugh disrobe at a party during his freshman year, after which “friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.”
Kavanaugh did not provide comment to the writers, and the classmate who witnessed the incident declined to discuss it. The New York Times story cited two officials who communicated with that classmate.
The Justice Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the president’s tweet.
At least one Democratic presidential contender, former housing secretary Julian Castro, called on Kavanaugh to be impeached over the incident.
“It’s more clear than ever that Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath. He should be impeached,” Castro wrote in a post on Twitter. “And Congress should review the failure of the Department of Justice to properly investigate the matter.”
It is exceedingly rare for justices to be impeached. The only time it happened was with Justice Samuel Chase in 1805, and Chase was ultimately acquitted by the Senate.
