A Democratic senator suggested the FBI’s background check on claims of sexual assault against Brett Kavanaugh, then a Supreme Court candidate, in 2018 may have been “ fake ” and wants newly beaten Attorney General Merrick Garland to assist in an investigation, said a report Tuesday.
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee who held Kavanaugh’s controversial confirmation hearing, is calling on Garland to assist the Senate, questioning how thoroughly the FBI has carried out the investigation, the report said. Guardian.
Christine Blasey Ford came forward to testify that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her decades ago when they were both high school students in Maryland.
Kavanugh vehemently denied the charges and brought decades-old magazines from his high school days to defend himself.
But Democrats in the judiciary who were investigating the allegations claimed the FBI failed to conduct a thorough investigation because agents failed to interview Kavanaugh or Ford.
In a letter to Garland, Whitehouse said some witnesses wanted to talk to the FBI about their allegations against Kavanaugh, but were turned down by the agency, saying their cases had never been assigned to an agent and no evidence had been collected.
“This was unique behavior in my experience, as the Office is usually open to information and evidence; But in this matter, the shutters were closed, the drawbridge erected, and there was no entry point where members of the public or Congress could provide information to the FBI, “Whitehouse said, according to the Guardian.
He argued that although the FBI had set up a “ tip line, ” senators were not given information on how or whether the new claims were being processed or evaluated.
And while a review of the allegations coming in through the ‘tip line’ indicated that the FBI had received a ‘pile’ of new information, senators were given no explanation as to whether further steps had been taken to review the new data, Whitehouse claims. .
“This ‘tip line’ seems to have worked more like a landfill chute, sending anything that came through the chute to the figurative dumpster without checking,” he said.
He said he wanted answers about “how, why, and at whose request” the FBI conducted a “fake investigation” and whether the claims collected in the “tip line” followed the norm of other allegations collected through tips.