Matt Damon does Kavanaugh:

Trump is telling the FBI it can’t investigate what it needs to investigate to get at the truth about Kavanaugh.

The White House is limiting the scope of the FBI’s investigation into the sexual misconduct allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, multiple people briefed on the matter told NBC News.

While the FBI will examine the allegations of Christine Blasey Ford and Deborah Ramirez, the bureau has not been permitted to investigate the claims of Julie Swetnick, who has accused Kavanaugh of engaging in sexual misconduct at parties while he was a student at Georgetown Preparatory School in the 1980s, those people familiar with the investigation told NBC News. A White House official confirmed that Swetnick’s claims will not be pursued as part of the reopened background investigation into Kavanaugh.

…

Instead of investigating Swetnick’s claims, the White House counsel’s office has given the FBI a list of witnesses they are permitted to interview, according to several people who discussed the parameters on the condition of anonymity. They characterized the White House instructions as a significant constraint on the FBI investigation and caution that such a limited scope, while not unusual in normal circumstances, may make it difficult to pursue additional leads in a case in which a Supreme Court nominee has been accused of sexual assault.

The limited scope seems to be at odds with what some members of the Senate judiciary seemed to expect when they agreed to give the FBI as much as a week to investigate allegations against Kavanaugh, a federal judge who grew up in the Washington DC area and attended an elite all-boys high school before going on to Yale.

Well they don’t want to risk actually finding something.

President Donald Trump said on Saturday that the FBI has “free reign” in the investigation. “They’re going to do whatever they have to do,” he said. “Whatever it is they do, they’ll be doing — things that we never even thought of. And hopefully at the conclusion everything will be fine.”

The president also said he thinks Flake’s role in delaying the vote is fine. “Actually this could be a blessing in disguise,” Trump continued. “Because having the FBI go out, do a thorough investigation, whether its three days or seven days, I think it’s going to be less than a week. But having them do a thorough investigation, I actually think will be a blessing in disguise. It’ll be a good thing.”

No, you pud, it’s not “in disguise” – finding out the truth is a good thing.

(Also odd that he thinks seven days is less than a week, but whatev.)

If the FBI learns of others who can corroborate what the existing witnesses are saying, it is not clear whether agents will be able to contact them under the terms laid out by the White House, the two sources briefed on the matter said.

Some areas are off limits, the sources said.

So the goal isn’t to find out the truth but to pretend to do that and come back waving empty hands and shouting “Nothing there!”

Two sources familiar with the investigation said the FBI will also not be able to examine why Kavanaugh’s account of his drinking at Yale University differs from those of some former classmates, who have said he was known as a heavy drinker. Those details may be pertinent to investigating claims from Ramirez who described an alleged incident of sexual misconduct she said occurred while Kavanaugh was inebriated. Ramirez’s lawyer said Saturday that she had been contacted by the FBI and would cooperate.

The conditions under which the FBI’s reopened background check are occurring appears to differ from the one envisioned by Flake, who used his leverage as a swing vote to pressure the Trump administration to order the FBI investigation.

Flake said Friday he thought the FBI should decide the scope of the investigation.

“They’ll have to decide — the FBI you know, how far that goes,” he told reporters. “This is limited in time and scope and I think that it’s appropriate when it’s a lifetime appointment and allegations this serious and we ought to let people know that we’re serious about it.”

Updating to add elucidation by a law school professor:

This is to avoid referral for a criminal investigation into perjury. Even GOP would have a hard time confirming someone under criminal investigation

— Rebecca Roiphe (@rroiphe) September 29, 2018

So Kavanaugh can perjure himself right in front of us but as long as the FBI is blocked from talking to witnesses who can say “Oh yeah he was lying through his teeth,” he will still sail right on through to spend 20 or 30 or 40 years on the Supreme Court.

Then there’s the whole “I got into Yale!!” thing.

At one point, Senator Sheldon Whitehouse pursued a line of questioning about the “Beach Week Ralph Club,” a phrase that appeared in Kavanaugh’s yearbook next to his senior photo. Kavanaugh told Whitehouse that “Ralph” probably referred to vomiting, something that Kavanaugh attributed to his “weak stomach, whether it’s with beer or with spicy food or anything.” Whitehouse asked if the “Ralph Club” reference had to do specifically with alcohol, and Kavanaugh responded:

Senator, I was at the top of my class academically, busted my butt in school. Captain of the varsity basketball team. Got in Yale College. When I got into Yale College, got into Yale Law School. Worked my tail off.

It was a deflection, but the particular shield he raised was telling. His response seems to suggest a belief that a prestigious education stands as evidence of moral rightness.

I interpreted it a bit differently. Whitehouse was pressing on the drinking too much theme, and I think Kavanaugh was saying “Drunk or not, I still worked hard and got into Yale.” I think it was more about not being a sloppy drunk, a loser, a wastrel, a schmuck who drank away his future. He got drunk on his ass, he ralphed a lot, but by god he also put in the hours and grabbed the brass ring.

Which is true, and even sort of relevant if his point is that drinking a lot doesn’t mean he won’t do the work of a Supreme Court justice. It’s sort of relevant that he can both drink and do his job.

Sort of relevant, but also sort of not, because it’s more than the hours, it’s more even than the work. There is also for instance the matter of judgement: problem drinkers tend to have bad judgement. Maybe Kavanaugh is the exception to that tendency, but by god he spectacularly failed to demonstrate any such immunity on Thursday. I can’t begin to express how much I do not want an entitled enraged screaming asshole like that on the Supreme Court, and I am far from the only one.

A Facebook post (I don’t know who O. B. is):

O.B. : I was a dude who went to parties in the eighties, and worked on the yearbook staff, so let me shed some light on a few things:

“Boofing” doesn’t refer to farts or flatulence. Boofing is a very specific category of anal insertion. He lied about that. Under oath.

A comment said it’s a variant of BuFu, geddit?

“The devil’s triangle” is not and has never been a drinking game. It’s a euphemism for a threesome involving two men and one woman. He lied about that too. Under oath.

Yearbook editors do not doctor or change copy provided by students for their dedication page without their permission. Whatever he wrote in his yearbook is 100% his own words. He lied about that as well. Under oath.

Just like he lied about his drinking, just like he lied about never having assaulted anyone, just like he lied about the reasons why he won’t agree to an FBI investigation to prove his innocence, just like he lied about not having tried to rape Dr. Ford at that party.

The boy who tried to rape Dr. Ford at that party was exactly the same entitled, binge-drinking jock douchebag who got away with the same exact crap at your school in the eighties and nineties.

That’s who Brett Kavanaugh is.

I don’t even have to believe Dr. Ford. I do, but I don’t have to. I just don’t believe him. None of what he said today was true, and it was obvious. His lies were absurd and easy to debunk. He isn’t even a good liar.

Here’s a photo of the real Brett Kavanaugh. Not the sniveling gaslighting jackass in a cheap suit who barked at Senators today and whined about not being handed a job he feels entitled to.

Here’s the guy who shoved an innocent girl into a room with his friend, locked the door, tried to rape her, and then went on about his day. That’s his true face.

He lied under oath for the better part of an hour today, and every man who grew up in the same era fucking knows it.

Now the FBI is going to spend the next week investigating him.

Over the course of the morning I read, via a slew of name lawyers on Twitter, that both the American Bar Association and Yale Law school had withdrawn their endorsements of Kavanaugh pending an investigation. Greg Sargent at the Post wrote about it early in the day:

During his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, Brett Kavanaugh defended his qualifications for the Supreme Court by repeatedly citing his support from the American Bar Association. Crucially, Kavanaugh noted that the ABA had vetted him for the position. Kavanaugh said this not once but twice.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), Kavanaugh’s chief defender, a man who melted down in a fit of histrionic rage at the sight of Kavanaugh getting confronted with the thoroughly credible testimony of Christine Blasey Ford, also cited the ABA’s support for Kavanaugh. Graham specifically cited the ABA, which he called the “gold standard,” in making the case that Kavanaugh “lived a good life” and that “his integrity is absolutely unquestioned.”

Now the ABA has issued a new letter calling for a renewed FBI background check into the charges against Kavanaugh, insisting that the Judiciary Committee must not hold any vote on his nomination until this happens:

The American Bar Association urges the United States Senate Judiciary Committee (and, as appropriate, the full Senate) to conduct a confirmation vote on Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination only after an appropriate background check into the allegations made by Professor Ford and others is completed by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

So bang went Kavanaugh’s claim that the ABA had vetted him for the position. (Does that count as yet another of his many lies?)

What’s more, the ABA is also asserting that voting to move him forward now — absent a reopened FBI background check — would represent a complete abdication of advice and consent duty on the part of individual senators, one that would flout the rule of law and due process.

That is, a complete abdication of duty by senators like Jeff Flake of Arizona.

So any Republican senators who are lawyers might be deeply uncomfortable with that.

Sargent says the decision to order the FBI investigation means they will interview Mark Judge.

Kavanaugh absolutely would not say he was willing to have an FBI investigation yesterday, no matter how hard the Democrats pressed him. So with any luck this is curtains for that hateful whiny entitled blowhard.

So. It flipped at the last minute. You probably already know by now, and if you don’t you probably don’t care (this is very US-centric, but then again when the US sneezes the world catches antibiotic-resistant TB, plus there is the whole hostile indifference to women issue), but here it is anyway. Jeff Flake voted with the Republicans to move Kavanaugh from the committee to the full Senate, but he also made that conditional on an FBI investigation first. Which they should have done all along. Flake on his own would have left things as they are because Pence would break the tie, but it turned out Flake wasn’t on his own.

But Flake — as well as Minnesota Democratic Sen. Amy Klobuchar — suggested in the moments before the 11-10 vote that there were other Republicans who felt the same as Flake. As in, they would not support Kavanaugh’s confirmation unless and until the FBI investigation happens. Those senators are, presumably, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

None of what Flake did was binding — until the White House and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell weighed in. McConnell formally requested the White House to instruct the FBI to do supplemental background check, which “would be limited to current credible allegations against the nominee and must be completed no later than one week from today.”

The Senate Judiciary Committee announcement means that McConnell, as expected, has bowed to the fact that he does not currently have the votes. Presumably, Flake would not have a) made the one-week FBI investigation request and then b) voted for Kavanaugh to move favorably out of committee unless c) he knew that he had Murkowski and/or Collins (or some other Republican) was with him. (Murkowski confirmed to reporters after the session that she supports Flake’s proposal.)

President Donald Trump bowed to the inevitable on Friday afternoon, ordering an FBI investigation.

That’s an improvement on the grim march to the gallows of this morning.

Memory is complicated.

From the dizzying stream of incoming perceptions, the brain stores, or “encodes,” the sights, sounds, sensations and emotions that it deems important or novel. The quality of preservation may depend not only on the intensity of emotion in the moment an event occurs but on the mechanics of how that event is recorded and retrieved — in some cases, decades later.

“Recollection is always a reconstruction, to some extent — it’s not a videotape that preserves every detail,” said Richard J. McNally, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of “Remembering Trauma.” “The details are often filled in later, or dismissed, and guessing may become part of the memory.”

Also, I have read elsewhere, for instance in the work of Elizabeth Loftus, that recalling a memory changes it. There’s no such thing as an intact unchanged memory.

For a trauma victim, this encoding combines mortal fear and heart-racing panic with crystalline fragments of detail: the make of the gun, the color of the attacker’s eyes. The emotion is so strong that the fragments can become untethered from time and place. They may persist in memory even as other relevant details—the exact date, the conversation just before the attack, who else was in the room — fall out of reach.

“In situations of high arousal, the brain is flooded with hormones that strengthen those things you’re paying attention to,” said Daniela Schiller, a neuroscientist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. “But other details are less accessible.”

Conversely, experts suggest, there are scenarios in which someone could have committed an assault and yet also have almost no memory of it. If an assailant attaches little significance to an assault—for instance, if he doesn’t consider it an assault — his brain may only weakly encode details of the encounter.

Ahhh yes, of course. That makes sense. It seems all too clear that Kavanaugh never did consider what he was doing an assault. It was just “horseplay”; it was just horndog teenage boys doing what horndog teenage boys do; it was just Rock Hudson trying to nudge Doris Day into the sack; it was just Ensign Pruitt in Mister Roberts hoping to get the nurses drunk so that he could rape them; it was just good clean fun. If he had thought of it as rape maybe he would have remembered it, but naturally it wasn’t in his interest to think of it as rape, was it. Rape is bad, rape is a violent crime, rape is a felony, rape is low class, rape is for losers, rape is not something a nice white boy from a nice elite Catholic prep school would do. No no, it was just Brett and Mark having boyish romps with some girl whose name they never caught. They went downstairs laughing and forgot all about it.

A grotesque display of patriarchal resentment, Doreen St. Félix calls it.

At the time of this writing, composed in the eighth hour of the grotesque historic activity happening in the Capitol Hill chamber, it should be as plain as day that what we witnessed was the patriarchy testing how far its politics of resentment can go. And there is no limit.

For real. A woman testifies about what it was like to be pinned down and nearly suffocated by the nominee to the Supreme Court – and who flies into a rage? The male nominee who did the pinning down and near-suffocation, and a male Senator on his team. She was anxious and stressed but also serious and disciplined; the two hes were in spitting rages. Dominance sure does give people a lot of anger-privileges.

“Why suffer through the annihilation if it’s not going to matter?” Ford had told the Washington Post when she first went public with her allegations. With the word “annihilation” she conjured the spectre of Anita Hill, who, in her testimony against Clarence Thomas, in 1991, was basically berated over an exhausting two-day period, and diagnosed, by the senators interrogating her, with “erotomania” and a case of man-eating professionalism.

I remember it all too vividly. I particularly remember the “testimony” of John Doggett, and having to go out for a long walk to burn off the simmering rage he inspired.

Ford, in any case, was phenomenal, a “witness and expert” in one, and it seemed, for a moment following her testimony, that the nation might be unable to deny her credibility.

Then Kavanaugh came in, like an eclipse. He made a show of being unprepared. Echoing Clarence Thomas, he claimed that he did not watch his accuser’s hearing. (Earlier, it was reported that he did.) “I wrote this last night,” he said, of his opening statement. “No one has seen this draft.” Alternating between weeping and yelling, he exemplified the conservative’s embrace of bluster and petulance as rhetorical tools. Going on about his harmless love of beer, spinning unbelievably chaste interpretations of what was, by all other accounts, his youthful habit of blatant debauchery, he was as Trumpian as Trump himself, louder than the loudest on Fox News. He evaded questions; he said that the allegations brought against him were “revenge” on behalf of the Clintons; he said, menacingly, that “what goes around comes around.” When Senator Amy Klobuchar calmly asked if he had ever gotten blackout drunk, he retorted, “Have you?” (He later apologized to her.)

He behaved like an absolute pig – he behaved like a threat. He acted like any other guy who tears off the mask of mature civil normality to reveal a red-eyed furious asshole underneath. He completely, in my view (and that of many), nuked his own suitability for the Supreme Court…but it’s looking as if he will be put there anyway. A violent furious ragey rapey entitled privileged shithead who despises what he calls “the left” and sees plots to avenge “the Clintons” where there are none – on the Supreme Court.

There was, in this performance, not even a hint of the sagacity one expects from a potential Supreme Court Justice. More than presenting a convincing rebuttal to Ford’s extremely credible account, Kavanaugh—and Hatch, and Lindsey Graham—seemed to be exterminating, live, for an American audience, the faint notion that a massively successful white man could have his birthright questioned or his character held to the most basic type of scrutiny…Republican senators apologized to the judge, incessantly, for what he had suffered. There was talk of his reputation being torpedoed and his life being destroyed. This is the nature of the conspiracy against white male power—the forces threatening it will always somehow be thwarted at the last minute.

There was also much talk of his family. But who torpedoed his reputation? Who destroyed his life? Who brought all this on his family? Maybe it was not the Democrats or the plotters-for-theClintons or Christine Blasey Ford, maybe it was Kavanaugh himself. It’s pretty rich watching entitled drunk rapey guy blaming other people for his drunken rapey entitled ways.

Bad times; bad bad times.