Brett Kavanaugh had graphic questions for Bill Clinton about Lewinsky affair
Trump’s supreme court nominee opposed giving Clinton a ‘break’ during 1998 inquiry, according to a newly released memo
Lauren Gambino in Washington
Mon 20 Aug 2018 15.11 EDT Last modified on Tue 4 Sep 2018 10.23 EDT
Brett Kavanaugh “strongly opposed” giving Bill Clinton “any ‘break’” on questions regarding his sexual relationship with the White House intern Monica Lewinsky, according to a memo written by the supreme court nominee in 1998 and released to the public on Monday.
As Washington buzzed over Robert Mueller’s investigation of links between aides to Donald Trump and Russia and the chances of the special counsel being granted a presidential interview, the two-page document was released by the National Archives and Records Administration.
Twenty years ago, Kavanaugh was an associate counsel for the independent counsel Kenneth Starr, who was investigating the president. Writing on 15 August 1998, two days before Clinton testified to a grand jury from the White House, he posed 10 suggested questions about the affair with Lewinsky, many of them sexually explicit.
Kavanaugh also said Clinton had “lied to his aides”, “lied to the American people” and “disgraced … the office” with a “sustained propaganda campaign that would make Nixon blush”.
He was “strongly opposed to giving the president any ‘break’ in the questioning regarding the details of the Lewinsky relationship”, he wrote, unless Clinton “resigns” or “confesses perjury”.
He then suggested a list of questions. One was: “If Monica Lewinsky says that you inserted a cigar into her vagina while you were in the Oval Office area, would she be lying?”
Another: “If Monica Lewinsky says that you ejaculated in her mouth on two occasions in the Oval Office area, would she be lying?”
Kavanaugh also suggested asking Clinton “if Monica Lewinsky says that on several occasions in the Oval Office area, you used your fingers to stimulate her vagina and bring her to orgasm, would she be lying?” and “If Monica Lewinsky says that you masturbated into a trashcan in your secretary’s office, would she be lying?”
Kavanaugh urged that it was the function of the independent counsel to “make [Clinton’s] pattern of revolting behavior clear”.
“The idea of going easy on him at the questioning is thus abhorrent to me,” he wrote.
If successful, Kavanaugh will become Trump’s second appointed justice, tilting the court firmly to the right. His confirmation hearing is set to begin on 4 September and the Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell has said he wants a floor vote before 1 October.
Republicans and Democrats have clashed over access to documents related to Kavanaugh’s time as a staff member in the George W Bush White House, the release of which is part of the normal vetting process for supreme court nominees.
Democrats have made clear that Kavanaugh’s views on criminal investigations and executive powers will be a key focus of his hearing.
In a 2009 article for the Minnesota Law Review, Kavanaugh cited his experience as part of Starr’s team while arguing that presidents should not be “distracted” by potential criminal investigations while in office.
In the two-page memo released on Monday, he said it was the role of an independent or special counsel to gather and expose the “full facts regarding the actions of this president” for Congress to consider.
“The president has disgraced his office, the legal system, and the American people by having sex with a 22-year-old intern and turning her life into a shambles – callous and disgusting behavior that has somehow gotten lost in the shuffle,” Kavanaugh wrote.
Some details of the memo were previously reported but the document was not published in its entirety until Monday, when it was made public as part of 12,349 pages of records released by the National Archives in response to freedom of information requests.
In a statement, the Archives said the two-page memo was previously made public as part of papers at the Library of Congress belonging to Sam Dash, an ethics adviser to Starr who was also chief counsel to the Senate Watergate committee during the scandal that caused the resignation of Richard Nixon. He died in 2004.
https://www.theguardian.com/law/2018/aug/20/brett-kavanaugh-bill-clinton-questions-1998-memo-trump
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And:
Why Was Kavanaugh Obsessed With Vince Foster?
He needs to explain why he followed right-wing conspiracy theories about the White House aide’s suicide.
By Sean Wilentz
Mr. Wilentz is a professor of history at Princeton.
Brett Kavanaugh, President Trump’s nominee to replace Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court, has testified to the Senate that “a good judge must be an umpire — a neutral and impartial arbiter.” He and his supporters want us to believe that he would be such an umpire on the Supreme Court. But does his record support him? The refusal of the Senate Judiciary Committee majority to share thousands of highly pertinent documents naturally raises skepticism. But there is plenty already in the public record about which Judge Kavanaugh has yet to be held accountable.
Anticipating the imminent publication of Kenneth Starr’s memoir of the Clinton impeachment, I looked into Judge Kavanaugh’s files in the Office of Independent Counsel records, housed in the National Archives. What I discovered sheds light on how Mr. Kavanaugh made his way in his early career, and how he flagrantly breached his role as a neutral public servant and followed the imperatives of a political operative.
Mr. Kavanaugh served under Mr. Starr as associate independent counsel between 1994 and 1997, and then again in 1998. Although not yet a judge, he was charged with investigating impartially what Attorney General Janet Reno deemed substantial accusations of misconduct arising from a failed real estate investment known as Whitewater.
Judge Starr’s predecessor as independent counsel, Robert Fiske, had looked into unfounded claims that the White House counsel Vincent Foster, who committed suicide in Fort Marcy Park in 1993, had in fact been murdered as part of an alleged White House cover-up related to Whitewater. After a thorough investigation, Mr. Fiske concluded in 1994 that there was nothing to the conspiracy theories and that Mr. Foster, who suffered from depression, had indeed killed himself. Official accounts by the National Park Service in 1993 and by a Republican congressman, William Clinger, the ranking member of the House Government Affairs Committee in 1994, came to an identical conclusion, as did a bipartisan report of the Senate Banking Committee early in 1995.
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But shortly after the Senate report was released, Mr. Kavanaugh convinced Mr. Starr to reopen what he called a “full-fledged” investigation of the Foster matter, telling his colleagues, as justification, that “we have received allegations that Mr. Foster’s death related to President and Mrs. Clinton’s involvement” in Whitewater and other alleged scandals.
Who were these unnamed, presumably reliable sources on whose word the case should be reopened? Mr. Kavanaugh’s files in the National Archives make clear that they were some of the most ludicrous hard-right conspiracy-mongers of the time.
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One was Reed Irvine, a self-appointed debunker of the “fake news” of mainstream media. Another was Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, an English author of a book entitled “The Secret Life of Bill Clinton” that posited that the Oklahoma City bombing was an F.B.I. plot gone awry. A third was Christopher Ruddy, today the chief executive of Newsmax and confidant of President Trump, but at the time on the payroll of the right-wing tycoon Richard Mellon Scaife to promote conspiracies.
As inventive as they were vindictive, these partisans concocted all sorts of wild theories to explain why Mr. Foster could not have killed himself. According to one of Mr. Kavanaugh’s sources, Mr. Foster had been working for the National Security Agency and was being blackmailed by the Israelis over a secret Swiss bank account. Carpet fibers had been found on Mr. Foster’s clothing, which was proof positive that he was murdered, his body wrapped in a carpet and then dumped. Another charged that “long blond hairs” on Mr. Foster’s clothing pointed to a cover-up.
Mr. Kavanaugh noted in various memos that he personally believed that Mr. Foster had indeed committed suicide — “my thoughts, not the Office’s position,” he clarified at one point. But he did not file away the harebrained theories; instead, he apparently felt obligated to address the conspiracy-mongers’ already disproved fantasies. And for nearly three years at a cost of $2 million he aggressively followed up. He investigated the Swiss bank account connection, down to examining Mr. Foster’s American Express bills for flights to Switzerland. He meticulously examined the White House carpets, old and new. (By now, Mr. Foster had been dead four years.) He sent investigators in search of follicle specimens from Mr. Foster’s bereft, blond, teenage daughter. (“We have Foster’s hair,” one agent working for Mr. Kavanaugh reported in triumph.)
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/05/opinion/why-was-kavanaugh-obsessed-with-vince-foster.html
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So, no quarter could be given to Bill Clinton, a Democrat. But now the president must carry out the important business of the country and can't be distracted by a "witch hunt". Sounds like total hypocrisy to me.
Kavanaugh is incapable of impartiality.