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Trump Accuses Democrats of Running ‘Con Game’ Against Kavanaugh

UNITED NATIONS — President Donald Trump accused Democrats on Tuesday of orchestrating “a con game” against Judge Brett Kavanaugh in hopes of stopping his confirmation to the Supreme Court and said that one of two women who have accused him of sexual misconduct as a student was “all messed up” and “drunk” at the time.

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Trump Accuses Democrats of Running ‘Con Game’ Against Kavanaugh
By
Mark Landler
and
Peter Baker, New York Times

UNITED NATIONS — President Donald Trump accused Democrats on Tuesday of orchestrating “a con game” against Judge Brett Kavanaugh in hopes of stopping his confirmation to the Supreme Court and said that one of two women who have accused him of sexual misconduct as a student was “all messed up” and “drunk” at the time.

Lashing out as more stories emerge about Kavanaugh’s youth, Trump dispensed with the restraint that advisers have urged him to exercise and adopted the attack mode he prefers. Much as other Republicans have increasingly done in recent days, he portrayed the allegations against Kavanaugh as character assassination.

“I think it’s horrible what the Democrats have done. It’s a con game they’re playing; they’re really con artists,” he said while in New York for the annual session of the U.N. General Assembly. “They don’t believe it themselves. They know he’s a high-quality person. They don’t believe it. It’s just resist and obstruct. They are playing a con game and they are playing it very well. They play it actually much better than Republicans.”

He went on to call it a con game several more times, even at one point spelling it out, “C-O-N.”

The president’s comments came as Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans said that they had retained an outside counsel to aid in Thursday’s hearing, when Kavanaugh and his first accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, are scheduled to testify separately. The committee declined to identify the lawyer, who is a woman, citing safety concerns.

Blasey, who also goes by her married name, Ford, had sought to have senators question her rather than a lawyer. But mindful of the backlash after sharp questioning of Anita F. Hill during confirmation hearings for Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991, the all-male group of Republicans on the committee preferred to pass off the task to a professional and a woman.

“We have done it because we want to depoliticize the whole process, like the Democrats politicized the Anita Hill thing,” said Sen. Charles E. Grassley, R-Iowa, the Judiciary Committee chairman.

Grassley said the woman would also question Kavanaugh, although it was unclear if she would be the only one on the Republican side to do so.

“The whole purpose is to create an environment where it’s like what Dr. Ford has asked for, to be professional and not be a circus.”

For most of the past couple weeks, Trump has stuck to the script of defending his nominee without directly attacking the women accusing him. In recent days, the president has at times gone further, explicitly questioning the credibility of Blasey, saying that if the sexual assault she described happening in the early 1980s “was as bad as she says,” she or her parents would have reported it to the authorities.

His comments on Tuesday, however, went further than before. Even as the president of Colombia sat next to him during what was supposed to be a diplomatic meeting between the two heads of state, Trump expressed aggravation and anger, taking on the latest accuser in more scathing and personal terms.

Without naming her, Trump singled out Deborah Ramirez, who said in an interview with The New Yorker published this week that Kavanaugh exposed himself to her during a drinking party while they were students at Yale University.

“She said she was totally inebriated and she was all messed up and she doesn’t know it was him but it might have been him,” Trump said. Then, speaking sarcastically, he added, “Oh, gee, let’s not make him a Supreme Court judge because of that.” Asked if Ramirez should be allowed to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Trump questioned her reliability again: “The second accuser has nothing,” he said. “She thinks maybe it could have been him, maybe not. She admits she was drunk. She admits time lapses. There were time lapses. This is a person, and this is a series of statements that is going to take one of the most talented and one of the greatest intellects from a judicial standpoint in our country, keep him off the U.S. Supreme Court?”

The president said he watched Kavanaugh’s interview with Fox News on Monday in which he denied the allegations against him and suggested that he thought the nominee had been honest but not necessarily sure-footed.

“He was so truthful,” Trump said. “You’re also not seeing him on his footing.”

“This isn’t his footing,” he added. “He’s never been here before. He’s never had any charges like this, I mean charges come up from 36 years ago that are totally unsubstantiated.”

Democrats argued that Trump and other Republicans were casting a verdict without actually hearing from any accusers. “Senate Republicans promised that ‘anyone who comes forward as Dr. Ford has deserves to be heard,'” Senate Democrats said in a statement. “Unfortunately, it appears that Republican leaders have prejudged the outcome of Thursday’s hearing.”

Blasey has said that during a small high school party, a drunken Brett Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed, groped her, tried to remove her clothing and covered her mouth when she tried to scream. She said she escaped but never told anyone about it until decades later. She could not remember with certainty when it took place or in whose house but said she believed it happened in the summer of 1982 when he was 17 and she was 15. The three other people she identified being in the house at the time, including one who was in the room at the time, have all said they do not recall any such incident and never saw Kavanaugh mistreat women.

“I have never sexually assaulted anyone, not in high school, not ever,” Kavanaugh said in the Fox interview, joined by his wife, Ashley Estes Kavanaugh. He added, “I’ve always treated women with dignity and respect.”

No one has come forward to say they witnessed the incident that Ramirez described, but a former college roommate of Kavanaugh, James Roche, has said that he considers her “unusually honest” and that “based on my time with Brett, I believe that he and his social circle were capable of the actions that Debbie described.”

Republicans were trying to keep all of their members on board as the Thursday hearing approached. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of the Republicans on the fence, said her colleagues should not prejudge the allegations.

“We are now in a place where it’s not about whether or not Judge Kavanaugh is qualified,” Murkowski said in an extended interview with The New York Times in the Capitol on Monday night. “It is about whether or not a woman who has been a victim at some point in her life is to be believed.”

On the other hand, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said he was not persuaded by Ramirez’s story.

“I read the New Yorker article. It’s pretty thin. No one else remembered any of it,” he told reporters. “This is really getting kind of carried away, it’s feeling more like a circus. But again, I did feel like this first accuser should be heard.” Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, R-Utah, a Judiciary Committee member who has expressed doubt about the accusations against Kavanaugh, suggested that his confirmation could be voted on by this weekend. “He’s going to get confirmed,” Hatch predicted, according to CNN.

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