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The Trump administration did not allow the FBI to conduct a full-scale investigation into the sexual misconduct allegations against Brett Kavanaugh that threatened his Supreme Court confirmation, according to a new report, disputing then-President Donald Trump’s public claims at the time.
The report, released Tuesday by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., six years after he launched a Senate inquiry, says that the Trump administration “exercised total control over the scope of the investigation” and prevented the FBI from interviewing certain witnesses and following leads. As a result, the probe into the allegations against Kavanaugh was “flawed and incomplete” and “unworthy of reliance by the Senate,” the report says.
Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the court in 2018 had been in jeopardy due to allegations of sexual misconduct by Christine Blasey Ford, Deborah Ramirez and Julie Swetnick, which he denied. The FBI launched a supplemental investigation into the claims after Kavanaugh and Ford testified separately before the Senate Judiciary Committee and prior to the Senate vote on his confirmation.
The FBI concluded at the time that there was “no corroboration of the allegations made by Dr. Ford or Ms. Ramirez.” (Swetnick’s allegation was not included in its investigation.) Kavanaugh was ultimately narrowly confirmed to the high court.
The Senate report is a damning rebuke to the Trump administration’s insistence that it gave the FBI “free rein” to conduct the investigation into the allegations. Trump said at the time that he wanted the agency “to interview whoever they deem appropriate, at their discretion.” The findings corroborate reporting over the years that Trump officials worked to hamstring the investigation.
According to the new Senate report, the Trump administration not only “kneecap[ed] FBI investigators’ ability to adequately investigate those allegations, but the lack of transparency misled the Senate and the public about the investigation’s thoroughness.”
The Senate inquiry’s yearslong review comes so belatedly because of a lack of cooperation from the executive branch, Whitehouse said. The Trump administration stonewalled the Senate investigation and, although the Biden administration was more cooperative, the senator said “investigators still struggled to secure direct answers to written questions, faced considerable delays in receiving answers to those questions, and often received incomplete answers or answers that fully ignored lines of inquiry.”
The FBI didn’t comment on the Senate report to CNN, but told the outlet that it “follows a long-standing, established process through which the scope of the investigation is limited to what is requested.”
Kavanaugh did not respond to The Washington Post’s request for comment sent to the Supreme Court. A spokesperson for Sen. Chuck Grassley, who chaired the Judiciary Committee for the confirmation, told MSNBC that the report “doesn’t offer any legitimate, substantive new ground.”
Trump campaign spokesperson Karoline Leavitt told Axios that the report is “another attempt to delegitimize the Supreme Court.” Ford's attorneys, on the other hand, told Axios that the report confirmed the “sham effort directed by the Trump White House to silence brave victims and other witnesses who came forward and to hide the truth.”