Top 2020 Democratic contenders Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.) and Julian Castro of Texas announced on Sunday that Supreme Court Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh “must be impeached,” after a new, uncorroborated and disputed allegation of sexual misconduct against Kavanaugh surfaced in a New York Times piece.

The revitalized, longshot push to get Kavanaugh removed from the high court comes as Democrats’ attempt to impeach President Trump have largely stalled. Trump, for his part, suggested Kavanaugh should sue for defamation.

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The Times piece by Robin Pogrebin and Kate Kelly, adapted from their forthcoming book, asserted that a Kavanaugh classmate, Clinton-connected nonprofit CEO 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.”

According to The Times, Stier “notified senators and the FBI about this account, but the FBI did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly.”

But The Times’ article conspicuously did not mention that Pogrebin and Kelly’s book also found that the female student in question denied any knowledge of the alleged episode.

“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,” noted The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway. “Seems, I don’t know, significant.”

“Omitting these facts from the @nytimes story is one of worst cases of journalistic malpractice that I can recall,” wrote the National Review’s Washington correspondent, John McCormack on Twitter.

McCormack wrote separately: “If Kavanaugh’s ‘friends pushed his penis,’ then isn’t it an allegation of wrongdoing against Kavanaugh’s ‘friends,’ not Kavanaugh himself? Surely even a modern liberal Yalie who’s been to one of those weird non-sexual ‘naked parties‘ would recognize both the female student and Kavanaugh are both alleged victims in this alleged incident, barring an additional allegation that a college-aged Kavanaugh asked his ‘friends’ to ‘push his penis.'”

The Times went on to note in the article that it had “corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier,” but the article apparently meant only that The Times had corroborated that Stier made his claim to the FBI. No firsthand corroboration of the alleged episode was apparently obtained.

Nevertheless, Democrats announced a new effort to topple Kavanaugh.

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Impeaching Kavanaugh would require a majority vote in the Democratic-controlled House, and a highly unlikely two-thirds vote in the GOP-majority Senate would then be needed to remove him from the bench.

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