Kavanaugh Investigation: No Police Organization Would Entertain It

By martyweil @ Shutterstock.com

Lawyers’ for Christine Blasey Ford delivered a letter to the Judiciary Committee Chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley arguing that before Ford is summoned to a hearing to testify, there must be “full investigation by law enforcement officials [to] ensure that the crucial facts and witnesses in this matter are assessed in a non-partisan manner.”

Going what Andrew C. McCarthy calls “the extra mile in order to exhibit sensitivity to Ford’s alleged trauma,” the committee delayed the vote to provide Ford an opportunity to testify.

Mr. McCarthy has four points, which, as he notes, state the obvious:

1. In no case does even the most sympathetic, convincing victim of a crime get to dictate the terms of the investigation.
2. In any sexual-assault investigation, an interview of the alleged victim is among the first things that must be done. Here, moreover, it would bethe first thing, since after 36 years a forensic investigation is not possible. Because the alleged victim’s version of events would dictate the course of the rest of the investigation, it would be absurd to delay an interview.
3. As long as Ford’s counsel want to talk about regular, independent investigations, we should note that there is not a police organization in America that would entertain her allegation, in light of the lapse of time and the long-ago exhaustion of the statute of limitations. Professional investigators understand only too well the inherent unreliability of allegations raised in the manner Ford’s have been raised. The only relevance of this alleged incident is to a Senate function, so it is for the Senate committee to decide how to proceed.
4. As Ford’s lawyers well know, in our adversary system, we do not submit disputes to a team of independent expert investigators. We have advocates for each side —partisans — make the case as well as it can be made from their side’s perspective, and we let the other side attack with all its partisan might. We allow each side to examine the other’s witnesses. Based on this often heated clash, we expect that members of the public will be able to figure out what information is reliable, what is nonsense, and what the truth is. That is the process we use for deciding life-and-death criminal sentences, as well as civil judgments that can be financially ruinous. We have used it for centuries because it works.

The long-term goal here is to make the judicial-confirmation process so notoriously savage and demeaning that no sensible, well-meaning conservative or moderate person would agree to put himself and his family through it. The idea is to stock the courts with nothing but progressives and mediocrities willing to roll over for progressives. It is a disgrace that this should happen in this republic, and in connection with the courts, which are not supposed to be political forces, but which have been converted into an uber-political institution that progressives are desperate to control.

The short-term goal is to delay Kavanaugh’s nomination. Democrats should not be allowed to get away with it.

Read more from Andrew McCarthy in NRO.