On Saturday, The New York Times ran a story repeating allegations that Brett Kavanaugh was drunk at a party in college and had his genitals thrust into a woman’s face. The allegation has not been confirmed, and friends of the alleged victim say she has no recollection of the events. The man telling the story, Max Stier, represented Bill and Hillary Clinton in the 1990s when Bill Clinton was accused of exposing himself to a woman in a hotel room.
Stier’s story appears in the forthcoming book The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly. “A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student,” the authors wrote in a New York Times article teasing the book.
Interestingly, the alleged victim is not quoted in the article, and neither are any corroborating witnesses. In fact, The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway reported that “the book notes, quietly, that the woman Max Stier named as having been supposedly victimized by Kavanaugh and friends denies any memory of the alleged event.”
As for Max Stier, he has a long history with sexual assault claims, but from the other side. Stier, a Democrat, represented President Bill Clinton after Paula Jones accused him of exposing himself to her in a hotel room. Clinton settled with Jones for $850,000 and lost his law license for five years.
Stier also worked closely with David Kendall, representing Hillary Clinton against allegations of illegally handling classified information in the Whitewater investigation. Kavanaugh worked with Ken Starr on the other side of the Clinton impeachment battle. During his confirmation hearings, Kavanaugh had accused his opponents of being motivated by “revenge on behalf of the Clintons.” This allegation seems to confirm that.
The story gets even juicier, however. When Stier originally came forward with this allegation, no one believed him. According to the New York Times article, Stier “notified senators and the F.B.I. about this account, but the F.B.I. did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly.”
The FBI did not find the allegation worth pursuing, and no senator leaked this story to the press or used it in the hearings, when they were throwing everything in the book at Kavanaugh. Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) — now a flagging presidential candidate — read a rape allegation from an anonymous letter that had no return address or any means to identify, much less authenticate, it.
Perhaps the Democrats knew then that Max Stier’s connection to the Kavanaugh allegations would reveal their hand. The partisan nature of the attacks could be made abundantly clear, the Clinton connections plain as day, and the jig would be up.
Pogrebin and Kelly ran with Stier’s story, even though Max Stier was a Clinton lawyer, the story lacked corroboration, and the alleged victim had no recollection of the event. In fact, the story appears to be an attempt to bolster another flimsy accusation against the Supreme Court justice.
During the confirmation hearings, Deborah Ramirez claimed that Kavanaugh had exposed himself to her at a party at Yale. Although there should have been dozens of witnesses if the assault happened, Ramirez’s story went uncorroborated. “If I had done that, it would have been the talk of the campus,” Kavanaugh said during the confirmation battle.
Almost a year later, Pogrebin and Kelly claimed that it was the talk of the campus. “At least seven people, including Ms. Ramirez’s mother, heard about the Yale incident long before Mr. Kavanaugh was a federal judge. Two of those people were classmates who learned of it just days after the party occurred, suggesting that it was discussed among students at the time,” the authors wrote.
Yet this does little to shore up Ramirez’s claims. As PJ Media’s Matt Margolis noted, Ramirez herself “acknowledged that there are significant gaps in her memories” of the evening of the alleged incident and was “was reluctant to characterize Kavanaugh’s role in the alleged incident with certainty.” The New Yorker, which published the allegations, was also unable to find a single eyewitness, and none of the witnesses named by Ramirez as having been present for the incident corroborated her story—including Ramirez’s best friend.
This seems yet another attempt to delegitimize a duly appointed and confirmed Supreme Court justice. The lawyer for Christine Blasey Ford, the most famous of Kavanaugh’s sexual assault accusers, recently claimed that Kavanaugh should have “an asterisk” by his name. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) argued that Kavanaugh should be impeached.
Last year the Kavanaugh nomination was rammed through the Senate without a thorough examination of the allegations against him. Confirmation is not exoneration, and these newest revelations are disturbing. Like the man who appointed him, Kavanaugh should be impeached.
— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) September 15, 2019
So, a year after no allegation was bolstered after multiple investigations, Warren is suggesting that “these newest revelations,” which are similarly unconfirmed, justify impeaching a sitting Supreme Court justice? I understand appealing to the rabid Democratic base, but this scraping at the bottom of the barrel is shameful.
If Warren becomes the Democratic nominee, voters should remember this in November.
Follow Tyler O’Neil, the author of this article, on Twitter at @Tyler2ONeil.
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