WHITEWATER ALUM: Brett Kvanaugh picked for Sipreme Court.

Donald Trump tonight said Appeals Court Judge Brett Kavanaugh is his pick to fill an opening on the U.S. Supreme Court. There is an Arkansas angle.

He’s awful from an ideological point of view, of course, but likely impossible to defeat given the Republican Senate majority and his likely, but not obvious, endorsement of the Republican political agenda from anti-abortion views on down.

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The Arkansas angle. He spent some time in Little Rock as one of several members of Special Whitewater Persecutor Kenneth Starr’s team who have gone on to judgeships. Also: He’s the one potential Trump court nominee to whom I’ve spoken.

Back when the Starr team was spending $70 million to find something, anything, to hang on Bill Clinton, I made an FOI request to Starr for the amount of money they’d spent paying living expenses for congenital liar and star witness David Hale. At that time, Starr’s team was leaking like a sieve to the Washington Post and New York Times, to the point even of posing for magazine photos, but not talking to critics in the press like me.

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But, to Kavanaugh’s credit, he DID respond to my legal FOI request. And he did provide records in time that showed the feds had spent some $60,000 covering Hale’s living expenses, down to dog food.

Kavanaugh was a particularly odious player in the Starr persecution, as Ken Gormley’s definitive book on the persecution illustrated. He persisted in the Vince Foster murder fiction long after others had given it up. Also from Gormley:

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In a memo to “Judge Starr” (with a copy to “All Attorneys”), dated just two days before the grand jury showdown, Kavanaugh disclosed a stark division within [the Office of the Independent Counsel] over how to handle this slippery president. He wrote:

After reflecting this evening, I am strongly opposed to giving the President any “break” … unless before his questioning on Monday, he either i) resigns or ii) confesses perjury and issues a public apology to you. I have tried hard to bend over backwards and to be fair to him. … In the end, I am convinced that there really are [no reasonable defenses]. The idea of going easy on him at the questioning is thus abhorrent to me…

[T]he President has disgraced his Office, the legal system, and the American people by having sex with a 22-year-old intern and turning her life into a shambles — callous and disgusting behavior that has somehow gotten lost in the shuffle. He has committed perjury (at least) in the [Paula] Jones case. … He has tried to disgrace [Ken Starr] and this Office with a sustained propaganda campaign that would make Nixon blush.

Kavanaugh listed ten sample questions, however explicit and unsavory, that he believed Starr and his questioners should ask. They included the following:

…If Monica Lewinsky says that you ejaculated into her mouth on two occasions in the Oval Office area, would she be lying?

If Monica Lewinsky says that on several occasions you had her give [you] oral sex, made her stop, and then ejaculated into the sink in the bathroom off the Oval Office, would she be lying?

If Monica Lewinsky says that you masturbated into a trashcan in your secretary’s office, would she [be] lying?

If there’s anything that endeared him to Trump, it had to be what David Brock, former Clinton foe-turned-liberal wrote in a book:


Perfect.

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