Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) said Thursday he suspects a cover-up after the FBI found nothing to support Christine Blasey Ford’s sexual assault allegations against U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
“I’ve seen the report,” Blumenthal (pictured above) said during an interview with MSNBC. “I want to reread parts of it. But my very emphatic impression is that this set of interviews is at best, most charitably, woefully incomplete. To put it bluntly, it smacks of a whitewash, even a cover-up.”
Blumenthal’s comments drew a strong rebuke from Sen Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who said in a tweet, “It’s fine to disagree with Judge Kavanaugh’s judicial philosophy or take issue with any of his 300+ opinions from his time on the DC Circuit. But to accuse the FBI of a cover-up because they didn’t find anything new to support your smear is too far.”
The Connecticut Democrat faced his own credibility crisis in the recent past when The New York Times revealed during his 2010 Senate campaign that he had claimed to have served in the U.S. military in Vietnam, when in fact he had not.
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“’We have learned something important since the days that I served in Vietnam,’ Mr. Blumenthal said to the group gathered in Norwalk in March 2008. ‘And you exemplify it. Whatever we think about the war, whatever we call it — Afghanistan or Iraq — we owe our military men and women unconditional support,’” The Times reported.
“There was one problem: Mr. Blumenthal, a Democrat now running for the United States Senate, never served in Vietnam. He obtained at least five military deferments from 1965 to 1970 and took repeated steps that enabled him to avoid going to war, according to records.”
Blumenthal eked out a victory in 2010 despite the revelations of his lying about his military record.
He easily won a second term in 2016 in his heavily Democratic state against an underfunded Republican opponent.
Ford went public just before the Senate Committee on the Judiciary was expected to vote on advancing Kavanaugh’s nomination to the full Senate. She said Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a 1982 suburban Maryland party, when both were high schoolers.
Related: Senate Erupts as FBI Releases Kavanaugh Sexual Assault Report
Kavanaugh strenuously denied Ford’s allegations, and none of the four people she said would verify her claims did so. The FBI then launched its seventh background review of Kavanaugh since he entered public service in 1998.
The Senate received the report of that week-long investigation early Thursday.
Senators who read it said the FBI found no evidence to support Ford’s allegations.
Democrats, led by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the ranking minority member of the judiciary committee, have tried every tactic they could come up with to delay the Kavanaugh confirmation.
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