S E E D E D C O N T E N T
It has not been in the Republican interest to highlight Brett Kavanaugh's longtime career as a rabid Republican partisan, but his biography speaks for itself. It seems ridiculous to think that a man could catapult himself from a position as a Ken Starr investigator to the Bush torture-supporting White House to now being hailed by Republicans as a supposedly neutral and unbiased legal observer who would never ever do a partisan thing, but here we are.
Kavanaugh's time as an underling in the blatantly and viciously partisan Ken Starr "investigation" of any and all dirt that could possibly be uncovered or invented about then-president Bill Clinton has been left a bit mysterious, by design. We know Kavanaugh was tasked with investigating the very seediest of far-right conspiracy theories, including the notion that Clinton White House counsel Vince Foster's suicide was in fact an elaborate murder staged by, no sh-t, the sitting president and his wife for some reason. It was asinine, and deeply offensive to the family, and it had been investigated and dismissed multiple times before Kavanaugh ever put his own hands on it. So why did he do it?
Of all the possible things Kavanaugh could have "investigated" under Ken Starr, how did he end up in charge of the sleaziest, most conspiracy-addled, already-debunked Vince Foster “theories?" That was the gutter of Republicandom, even back then.
The answer, as Sean Wilentz narrates in the New York Times , appears to be that it was Brett Kavanaugh's idea, and he insisted on it. He spent $2 million in taxpayer money and nearly three years of "investigation" on it, and he did so, according to his own files, based on the theories of a collection of conspiracy-minded nutcases with absolutely no credibility on anything .
But shortly after the Senate report was released, Mr. Kavanaugh convinced Mr. Starr to reopen what he called a “full-fledged” investigation of the Foster matter, telling his colleagues, as justification, that “we have received allegations that Mr. Foster’s death related to President and Mrs. Clinton’s involvement” in Whitewater and other alleged scandals. [...]
One [“source”] was Reed Irvine, a self-appointed debunker of the “fake news” of mainstream media. Another was Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, an English author of a book entitled “The Secret Life of Bill Clinton” that posited that the Oklahoma City bombing was an F.B.I. plot gone awry. A third was Christopher Ruddy, today the chief executive of Newsmax and confidante of President Trump, but at the time on the payroll of the right-wing tycoon Richard Mellon Scaife to promote conspiracies.
To explain for the young’uns, this was literally the bottom rung of conservative conspiracy theorists, only a step sideways from the nuts handing out flyers at airports insisting that the Queen of England was secretly running drugs from South America because reasons. So either Kavanaugh had embedded himself with the worst conspiracy kooks the movement had to offer, or he was cynically using known fraudulent sources purely because he needed something, anything, to use as hyper partisan fodder against the sitting president—and he didn't give a damn how dishonest he had to be to do it.
The more I hear come out of Kavanaugh's mouth, the more I dislike him and believe he is dishonest. He was , for years, a political operative for conservative causes. He is NOT going to rule in the Supreme Court on the merit of cases, as he claims, he is going to rule based on right wing ideology considerations.
He should be rejected and a moderate nominated. If Trump would do that I would then say that when the Democrats get control they should nominate moderates to the SC as well. We should not have political partisans like Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court.