Dave Hunter says:

How is the president going to get Sessionzzz to open an investigation? Multiple referrals for prosecution have been made by Grassley and others without any result. Further, you can see the corruption in the FBI and DOJ in the case of James Wolfe, former Director of Security for the Senate Intel Committee. He has only been charged with lying to the FBI, not for mishandling classified material which he clearly and unequivocally did. President Trump and the Congress need to hit the “delete” key on the FBI and start over. Christopher Wray and Rod Rosenstein were his two worst appointments of all time.

Doug says:

I wish people would place this in its actual perspective. What the events in the Senate Judiciary Committee merely made graphic the rise of the sentiment for group justice – kind of like what the Brown Shirts thought should be applied to Jews in Weimar Germany. It’s not an assault on the Constitution; it’s an assault on societal standards of justice and fair play for individuals.

It is better to ask: “What would it take for Ford’s story to be incredible?” This is a straightforward test. Credibility of every story benefits from others who perceived the same thing. Ten unrelated people saying that a National Guard shot a student at Kent State makes any one version more credible. This is one form of corroboration. Another, lesser , form of corroboration is known as a “prior consistent statement”. In other words, perhaps the witness to the Kent State shooting did not report to the authorities at the time but wrote a letter a day later to a family member laying out the details. In a fight over whether the witness was present and saw the event at a trial years later, this letter would serve to corroborate the witness’s testimony for obvious reasons if that testimony were challenged. Lack of corroboration makes a witness less credible.

Other aspects of a witness can make a story less credible. For example, a witness who destroys potential evidence typically is viewed as a less credible witness and the story the less credible as well. Similarly, inconsistencies in a story can make the witness and the witness’s story less credible. I fault the media for characterizing Mitchell as “chipping away” at Ford’s story; that’s a time honored means of getting at credibility. Inconsistencies provide reasons to doubt a version of events. Bias can make a witness and her testimony less credible. So too can obviously false statements. Sen. Blumenthal had it right with his Latin adage. He merely was a flawed messenger.

Ford had unbelievable issues with her story on all these fronts. She had no corroborating witness. People she said were present and would corroborate her did not. Her so-called best friend denied even knowing Brett Kavanaugh. That’s a major blow to a story that the two went to a party with others they knew. She also had no prior consistent statement. The 2012 statement recorded by the therapist in a “couples session” did not name Kavanaugh and had other information that was inconsistent with her story. In particular, it stated a time when the two could not have attended such a party. Moreover, Ford testified that the “couples session” resulted from her husband’s inability to empathize with her need for a second front door on their house. However, public records reflect that the door was installed years earlier and was used by renters as a separate entrance. There are substantial reasons to doubt Ford’s reason for going to the therapist, whose records she has only selectively released. Ford deleted her social media content before news of her became public. Did this media evidence a pre-existing bias, even admissions that Ford was determined to do whatever it took to prevent Kavanaugh from taking a position on the Supreme Court? We will never know, but the law recognizes explicitly that destruction of potential evidence supplies reason to infer the worst. She said that she did not want to go public, but did not take up the SJC’s offer to question her in California. She laid this off to not knowing of the offer, which was publicly proclaimed in every media outlet in teh nation. Her legal team announced that she was afraid to fly and therefore would not come to D.C. immediately to speak with the Committee. This clearly wasn’t true; she flies all the time. Anyone would infer from these statements that she sought an excuse to meet for weeks with lawyers and politicians. Moreover, the details concerning the house in which this event allegedly occurred seemed to shift as inconsistencies in each location and floor plan were raised.

There were many other issues from other quarters, but the ones listed above were inherent issues intrinsic to what she said at different times and the lack of third party or other corroboration. What else would it take to make her story incredible? Anyone who takes Ford’s side needs to explain that to me.

The story was the effort of the left to overcome that plethora of inconsistencies with “group justice”. She was a woman. To the left and its demonstrators and senators, her story had credibility apart from its setting and despite its content. In fact, it was credible despite her inability to remember almost any significant detail and lack of any corroboration. In sum and substance, Martin Luther King asked that each individual be judged on the content of his or her character. The threat in what we’ve just seen is to that approach to human society and the individuals in it.