During the contentious Supreme Court confirmation hearing of Brett Kavanaugh, the FBI received 4,500 tips related to sexual harassment claims against the powerful judge.
For years, Democratic lawmakers have asked the FBI if the leads were investigated. On Thursday, they said they finally got an answer – and they’re unsatisfied. The New York Times explains:
In a letter dated June 30 to two Democratic senators, Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Chris Coons of Delaware, an F.B.I. assistant director, Jill C. Tyson, said that the most “relevant” of the 4,500 tips the agency received during an investigation into Mr. Kavanaugh’s past were referred to White House lawyers in the Trump administration, whose handling of them remains unclear.
The letter left uncertain whether the F.B.I. itself followed up on the most compelling leads. The agency was conducting a background check rather than a criminal investigation, meaning that “the authorities, policies, and procedures used to investigate criminal matters did not apply,” the letter said.
“If the FBI was not authorized to or did not follow up on any of the tips that it received from the tip line, it is difficult to understand the point of having a tip line at all,” Whitehouse and Coons wrote in a letter to FBI Director Chris Wray sent on Wednesday night.
More from The New York Times:
In an interview, Mr. Whitehouse said the F.B.I.’s response showed that the F.B.I.’s handling of the accusations into misconduct by Mr. Kavanaugh was a sham. Ms. Tyson’s letter, Mr. Whitehouse said, suggested that the F.B.I. ran a “fake tip line that never got properly reviewed, that was presumably not even conducted in good faith.”
Christine Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of raping her in the 1980s when they were both teenagers. Kavanaugh vociferously denied the allegations. The FBI was asked to investigate Ford’s claims and the claims of other Kavanaugh associates who said he was sexually inappropriate in college.
Kavanaugh was eventually confirmed. The FBI’s brisk inquiry was criticized by Democrats. More from The Guardian:
On 1 August 2019, Coons and Whitehouse wrote to Wray asking for a complete picture of how the FBI handled the supplemental background investigation of Kavanaugh, Whitehouse’s statement continued on Thursday.
Whitehouse said they asked “why the FBI failed to contact witnesses whose names were provided to the FBI as possessing ‘highly relevant’ information; how involved the Trump White House was in narrowing the scope of the investigation; whether the FBI had used a tip line in previous background investigations to manage incoming allegations and information regarding a nominee; and more.”
After Whitehouse received an answer from the FBI, he and his colleague wrote to Wray, “The admissions in your letter corroborate and explain numerous credible accounts by individuals and firms that they had contacted the FBI with information ‘highly relevant to … allegations’ of sexual misconduct by Justice Kavanaugh, only to be ignored.”
