President Donald Trump is standing by his nominee for the Supreme Court, calling the accusations against Judge Brett Kavanaugh “totally political,” hours after The New Yorker magazine published a largely unsubstantiated claim by a second accuser.
“Judge Kavanaugh is an outstanding person. I am with him all the way,” Trump said on Sept. 24, after arriving in New York to attend a meeting of the U.N. General Assembly.
“For people to come out of the woodwork from 36 years ago, and 30 years ago and never mention it—all of a sudden, it happens,” Trump said. “In my opinion, it’s totally political.”
The New Yorker published the claim from the second accuser, Deborah Ramirez, on Sept. 23. She is accusing Kavanaugh of an incident while both were students at Yale University more than three decades ago. The New Yorker didn’t confirm the allegation with eyewitnesses. The Epoch Times didn’t independently verify Ramirez’s account and is refraining from publishing the details of the accusation.
The authors of the article, Ronan Farrow and Jane Meyer, say that after interviewing more than 36 people, The New Yorker couldn’t find anyone who would confirm the accuser’s allegation. Specifically, six people who knew both Ramirez and Kavanaugh have categorically denied the accuser’s claim.
“We were the people closest to Brett Kavanaugh during his first year at Yale. He was a roommate to some of us, and we spent a great deal of time with him, including in the dorm where this incident allegedly took place. Some of us were also friends with Debbie Ramirez during and after her time at Yale. We can say with confidence that if the incident Debbie alleges ever occurred, we would have seen or heard about it—and we did not,” the friends and classmates wrote in a statement to The New Yorker.
One of the six people was Ramirez’s best friend, with whom she shared intimate details of her life.
“I was never told this story by her, or by anyone else. It never came up. I didn’t see it; I never heard of it happening,” said the woman, who was married to a male classmate who was alleged to have been involved.
“There is now a frenzy to come up with something—anything—that will block this process and a vote on my confirmation from occurring. These are smears, pure and simple. And they debase our public discourse,” Kavanaugh wrote.
“The coordinated effort to destroy my good name will not drive me out. The vile threats of violence against my family will not drive me out. The last-minute character assassination will not succeed,” the judge added.
The only person to corroborate the accuser’s claim has maintained anonymity, and claims to have heard it from an unidentified friend who attended the event described in the article. The unidentified person told the anonymous source that he heard of the allegation “either on the night of the party or in the next day or two.”
Ramirez told the magazine that there were gaps in her memory because she was drinking on the night of the incident.
“In her initial conversations with The New Yorker, she was reluctant to characterize Kavanaugh’s role in the alleged incident with certainty,” the article stated.
After six days of “assessing her memories,” Ramirez became confident of them, the authors claim.
The second accuser’s allegation was published shortly after the judiciary panel had negotiated the terms of a hearing at which the first accuser, Christine Ford, will testify. Since Ford detailed her story to The Washington Post, all of the people she alleged had attended a 1982 teenage house party in Maryland have come forward to deny the allegation.
Trump nominated Kavanaugh for the seat of retiring Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy. Kavanaugh, a conservative who could tilt the highest court for decades once confirmed, sailed through the confirmation process before Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the ranking Democrat on the committee, revealed the existence of an allegation against him after sitting on it for weeks.
Republicans have slammed the timing of the accusations as a political smear campaign aimed at derailing Kavanaugh’s confirmation.
Ford is the only person from the alleged party that hasn’t provided a statement to the committee. She is scheduled to testify in an open hearing on Sept. 27.
In a letter to Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), Feinstein called for the Ford–Kavanaugh hearing to be canceled in light of the new allegation against Kavanaugh. Feinstein also demanded an FBI investigation of the claims, despite repeated explanations from Grassley that it is the Senate’s constitutional duty to conduct the probe.
