President Donald Trump came out with a full throated defense of Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh on Sunday following fresh allegations of sexual misconduct. The justice should “start suing people” or the Department of Justice “should come to his rescue,” the president said without specifying what that rescue would entail. At first, Trump wrote that Kavanaugh should sue “for liable,” misspelling the word “libel.” Roughly an hour later, he sent out a new tweet with the correct spelling of the word. Trump said the accusations against Kavanaugh were an effort to “influence his opinions.”
In another tweet, the president said that “the Radical Left Democrats and their Partner, the LameStream Media, are after Brett Kavanaugh again, talking loudly of their favorite word, impeachment.” The president said that it was all part of an effort to “scare” Kavanaugh “into turning liberal.”
Although he never mentions it outright, the president was responding to a New York Times article published late Saturday by the authors of a new book about sexual misconduct allegations that engulfed Kavanaugh’s confirmation process. The piece focused on a claim that at a party in Yale, Kavanaugh had drunkenly “pulled down his pants and thrust his penis” at a fellow student, “prompting her to swat it away and inadvertently touch it.” The reporters also wrote that they uncovered a separate instance of Kavanaugh pulling out his penis at a different party, “where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.” Although senators and the FBI knew about the allegations they failed to follow up, according to the Times.
The Times piece quickly caused the hashtags #ImpeachKavanaugh and #ImpeachKavanaughNow to trend on Twitter. For now at least one Democratic presidential hopeful has picked up the baton. Former housing secretary Julian Castro said Kavanaugh should be impeached as “it’s more clear than ever” that he “lied under oath.” On ABC’s This Week Sen. Amy Klobuchar was asked whether Kavanaugh should be impeached and didn’t give a straight answer but did make clear she thinks an investigation is needed to figure out why the Justice Department did not act when it knew about allegations against him during the confirmation process. “My concern here is that the process was a sham,” Klobuchar said.
