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US-COURT-POLITICS-ASSAULT-UPDATE
Trump defends Supreme Court pick but says he could change mind
WASHINGTON, Sept 27, 2018 (BSS/AFP) – US President Donald Trump praised
his Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh but said he would be open to
withdrawing his nomination if he finds testimony on Thursday about sexual
assault allegations against him to be credible.
“I can always be convinced,” Trump said on the eve of a Senate Judiciary
Committee hearing featuring one of Kavanaugh’s accusers.
“If I thought he was guilty of something like this, yes, sure,” Trump
said at a press conference on the sidelines of the UN General Assembly in New
York. “It’s possible I’ll hear that, and I’ll say, ‘Hey, I’m changing my
mind.'”
“I want to watch,” Trump said ahead of the hearing featuring Christine
Blasey Ford, a university professor who has accused Kavanaugh of sexually
assaulting her when they were teenagers.
“I look forward to what she has to say,” Trump said. “I also look
forward to what Judge Kavanaugh has to say. I think it’s going to be a very
important day in the history of our country.”
In prepared testimony released on Wednesday, the 51-year-old Blasey Ford
said she feared Kavanaugh would rape her during the attack, which she said
occurred in the summer of 1982.
Blasey Ford said the incident left her “drastically altered,” but it was
her “civic duty” to tell lawmakers what happened.
“I am here today not because I want to be. I am terrified,” she adds.
Kavanaugh has also been accused of exposing himself to a classmate,
Deborah Ramirez, during an alcohol-fueled Yale University party a few years
later.
On Wednesday, a third woman came forward with explosive allegations,
saying she witnessed sexually abusive behavior by Kavanaugh when he was a
teenager.
Trump described Kavanaugh as a “great gentleman” and a “great intellect”
and said he believed the accusations against the conservative judge were
“false.”
– ‘Big, fat con job’ –
Trump said he was skeptical because he personally had been the target of
“false statements” in the past made by various women.
“I’ve had a lot of false charges made against me,” he said. “People want
fame, they want money, they want whatever.”
He also slammed his Democratic opponents, accusing them of being “con
artists” and destroying the 53-year-old judge’s reputation.
The Kavanaugh nomination has turned into a political firestorm ahead of
November congressional elections and is threatening to derail Trump’s push to
get a conservative-minded majority on the top court ahead of the vote.
Democrats on Wednesday demanded that Trump withdraw Kavanaugh’s
nomination or order an FBI investigation.
“He is asking for a lifetime appointment to the nation’s highest court
where he will have the opportunity to rule on matters that will impact
Americans for decades,” the 10 Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee
said in a letter to the president.
The third woman to come forward, Julie Swetnick, said she saw Kavanaugh
engage in sexually abusive behavior as a teenager and claimed she had been
drugged and gang-raped at a party he attended in approximately 1982.
Kavanaugh strongly denied the allegations by Swetnick, 55, who has
worked extensively for the federal government.
“This is ridiculous and from the Twilight Zone,” he said in a statement.
“I don’t know who this is and this never happened.”
Later, the judiciary committee said it had received a fourth allegation,
this time in a letter from an anonymous source who said their daughter and
others had witnessed Kavanaugh physically assault a woman while intoxicated
in Washington in 1998, shoving her “up against the wall very aggressively and
sexually.”
But a spokesman for the committee told AFP the letter lacked credibility
and the panel had no way to investigate the matter because the complaint was
anonymous.
– ‘Physically aggressive behavior’ –
Swetnick said she saw Kavanaugh behave as a “mean drunk” at parties they
both attended growing up in suburban Maryland.
“I observed Brett Kavanaugh drink excessively at many of these parties
and engage in abusive and physically aggressive behavior towards girls,
including pressing girls against him without their consent, ‘grinding’
against girls, and attempting to remove or shift girls’ clothing to expose
private body parts,” Swetnick said.
She did not specifically claim Kavanaugh took part or that he was aware
of her rape, but said that he and other boys in his circle engaged in similar
behavior.
She said she saw efforts by “Kavanaugh and others to cause girls to
become inebriated and disoriented so they could then be ‘gang raped’ in a
side room or bedroom by a ‘train’ of numerous boys.
“I have a firm recollection of seeing boys lined up outside rooms at
many of these parties waiting for their ‘turn’ with a girl inside the room,”
she said.
“These boys included Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh,” she said. Judge is
a boyhood friend of Kavanaugh who has written a book describing the
debauchery of his high school years.
Kavanaugh, in prepared testimony released on Wednesday, repeated his
denial of Blasey Ford’s allegation and said “this effort to destroy my good
name will not drive me out.”
He told Senate Judiciary Committee investigators that he is “looking
forward” to the hearing on Thursday, according to a transcript of a call
released by the committee.
“I look forward to defending my name, defending my integrity,”Kavanaugh
said.
BSS/AFP/IJ/1522 hrs