American Bar Association reconsiders supporting Kavanaugh due to 'temperament'

Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Sept. 27, 2018.

In a letter to leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee on Friday, the American Bar Association said “new information of a material nature regarding temperament” prompted the group to reopen its evaluation of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
The letter addressed to Chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, and ranking member Sen. Dianne Feinstein D-Calif., referred to a Sept. 27 hearing in which Kavanaugh addressed sexual misconduct allegations leveled against him by Christine Blasey Ford.
Ford claims Kavanaugh attempted to rape her when they were in high school. Kavanaugh denies the accusation.
During his emotional testimony in front of the committee, Kavanaugh blasted his critics and got into heated exchanges with Democratic senators when they questioned him about his behavior in high school and college.
“This confirmation process has become a national disgrace,” he said during the hearing, before claiming the allegations were part of a smear campaign.
He also touted his “well qualified” rating from the ABA, the highest one it gives.
Kavanaugh’s behavior at the hearing prompted many to question his fitness and temperament to serve on the nation’s highest court.
On Thursday, retired Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens said he changed his views on Kavanaugh’s nomination following the hearing.
“I’ve changed my views for reasons that have no relationship to his intellectual ability,” Stevens said. “I feel his performance in the hearings ultimately changed my mind.”
On Friday, Justice Elena Kagan, speaking at a Princeton University conference, said she feared that adding Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court might place it in danger of being perceived as a political body instead of a neutral institution for resolving disputes, Politico reported.
"It's an incredibly important thing for the court to guard is this reputation of being impartial, being neutral and not being simply extension of a terribly polarizing process," Kagan said.
At the same conference, Justice Sonia Sotomayor said it was key for the court's justices to avoid the type of partisan rancor seen in other sectors of public life.
"We have to rise above partisanship and personal relationships, that we have to treat each other with respect and dignity and with a sense of amicability that the rest of the world doesn’t ... share," she said.
The ABA said it doesn’t expected a “re-vote” before the final Senate vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination slated for Saturday.
“Our original report must be read in conjunction with the foregoing. Our original rating stands.”
In a Thursday op-ed for the Wall Street Journal on, Kavanaugh said he may have been too emotional at the hearing.
"I know that my tone was sharp, and I said a few things I should not have said," he wrote.

Claim of 'thorough' FBI probe of Kavanaugh is 'absurd,' says friend of Ford who wasn't interviewed

Christine Blasey Ford testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee, in Washington, Sept. 27, 2018.

Lawyers for Christine Blasey Ford released a statement Friday from a friend of Ford's who says he is a corroborating witness to Ford’s sexual assault allegation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh -- and criticized the FBI for not interviewing him.
In a sworn statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Keith Koegler wrote that Ford told him in 2016, while they were watching their kids play together, that a federal court judge in Washington, D.C., had sexually assaulted her when they were in high school.
“There are a minimum of 7 additional people, known to the White House, the Senate Judiciary Committee and the FBI who knew about the assault prior to the nomination who were not interviewed,” Koegler wrote of the limited FBI probe into the allegation. “I am one of them.”
Ford’s revelation occurred around the same time when former Stanford University student Brock Turner was sentenced for raping an unconscious woman, he wrote.
“Christine expressed anger at Mr. Turner’s lenient sentence, stating that she particularly was bothered by it because she was assaulted in high school by a man who was now a federal judge in Washington, D.C.,” Koegler said.
Koegler said he had a copy of a June 29 email thread where Ford identified her alleged assaulter as President Trump’s “favorite for SCOTUS.”
He responded, “I remember you telling me about him, but I don’t remember his name. Do you mind telling me so I can read about him?”
“Brett Kavanaugh,” Ford replied.
Koegler said he’s known Ford and her husband for more than five years and coached their son’s baseball team.
In the declaration, Koegler also expressed frustration with the way Ford’s allegations have been handled by lawmakers and law enforcement authorities.
"The process by which the Senate Judiciary Committee has 'investigated' the facts related to the assault has been a shameless effort to protect Judge Kavanaugh," Koegler wrote. "The fact that the FBI did not interview either Christine or Judge Kavanaugh, by itself, renders absurd any assertion that the investigation was 'thorough.'"
Democrats have slammed the investigation as not complete or thorough.
Some Republicans, and Kavanaugh himself, have called the allegations against him part of a smear campaign to keep him off the bench.
Koegler denied any “grand-conspiracy” to conduct a “political hit job” on Kavanaugh, adding that “this was always about one woman struggling with a perverse choice.”
The Senate is expected to confirm Kavanaugh to the court Saturday.

NBC station fires reporter for wearing MAGA hat while covering Trump rally

KTTC-TV multimedia journalist James Bunner wears a "Make America Great Again" hat while interviewing people waiting to see President Trump in Rochester, Minn., Oct. 4, 2018.

A television reporter in southern Minnesota might need a new hat saying "Make Me Employed Again."
James Bunner, a multimedia journalist for NBC affiliate KTTC-TV in Austin, was fired Friday, reportedly for wearing a "Make American Great Again" hat while covering President Trump's rally in Rochester on Thursday.
As the rally got underway, images of Bunner wearing the bright red hat began appearing on Twitter.
Noel Sederstrom, the station's news director, told the Star Tribune of Minneapolis that the station's policy does not allow staff members to wear apparel from political campaigns while covering stories.
Bunner had uploaded a video of himself appearing to celebrate while dancing in a newsroom on Trump's inauguration day.
"Me watching the Trump inauguration," he wrote in the description.
Sederstrom told BuzzFeed News that Bunner was fired for wearing the hat during Thursday's rally, not because of the political views displayed on his social media pages.
Bunner doesn't have a listed phone number and didn't immediately return a social media message seeking comment Friday.

Collins, Manchin say 'aye,' appearing to cement Kavanaugh confirmation

Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Joe Manchin, D-W.Va on Friday said they intend to vote in favor of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation -- two crucial votes that appear to secure Kavanaugh's confirmation to the nation's highest court.
Moments after Collins spoke on the Senate floor announcing her intention to vote for the nominee, Manchin said in a statement he would also vote to confirm Kavanaugh. Manchin said while he had "reservations" due to sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh and his temperament, he said "I believe he will rule in a manner that is consistent with our Constitution."

Collins said the confirmation had resembled a "caricature of a gutter-level political campaign" and criticized Democrats for announcing their opposition to Kavanaugh before his name was even announced. She also criticized outside groups for distorting Kavanaugh's record and "over-the-top rhetoric."
As she began her speech, she was interrupted by protesters urging her to vote "no." The Senate was flooded by protesters in the days leading up to the vote, with activists hounding Republicans and urging them to vote against Kavanaugh's confirmation, citing decades-old sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh. Protesters also yelled "shame" at Manchin after his statement.

Collins dismissed claims that Kavanaugh would be a partisan judge, noted he had ruled in favor of parts of ObamaCare and ruled against a Bush-era terror conviction. She also said she was assured that Kavanaugh would not overturn Roe v Wade -- the 1973 decision that found a constitutional right to abortion. She also rejected concerns by Democrats about his temperament and that he was out of the judicial mainstream.
Collins, who told Fox News that she made her decision on Thursday evening, officially made her announcement on the floor of the Senate Friday, hours after the chamber voted 51-49 to advance Kavanaugh's nomination to a final vote on Saturday evening. Collins was one of four key undecided senators who were closely watched for how they would vote. Collins -- along with Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., and Manchin voted to invoke cloture on the nomination earlier Friday. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, voted "no."
Flake had suggested he would vote "yes" for Kavanaugh "unless something big changes."
Meanwhile, a source familiar with the confirmation process told Fox News that Manchin called to notify the White House that he was a "yes" for Kavanaugh. But White House officials learned of Collins' decision to support Kavanaugh in real time.
With a 51-49 majority in the Senate, Republicans expect passage by a razor-thin margin. And so every vote has been a subject of intense speculation and scrutiny.
At this point, White House officials are assuming that Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, will remain a "no" during Saturday's confirmation vote. She confirmed that she would not support the nomination in remarks on Capitol Hill Friday evening, saying that, invoking her conscience, "I could not conclude that he is the right person for the court at this time."
She won't vote a straight "no," though.  She said that due to the necessary absence of Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., they will have a “Pair Between Senators.” This collegial procedure will take place during the Saturday vote and will ensure the vote margin is the same, even with Daines walking his daughter down the aisle at her wedding. Murkowski will ask to be recorded as ‘present’ (though on record as a ‘no’ vote) while Daines is on record as supporting the nomination, but necessarily absent.
Murkowski said it's her hope "that this reminds us we can take very small steps to be gracious with one another."
Kavanaugh’s nomination was embroiled in a deeply divisive controversy that gripped the nation after multiple women made sexual assault allegations originating from his time in high school and college. The most prominent allegation was from California professor Christine Blasey Ford, who said that Kavanaugh assaulted her at a high school party. That allegation resulted in a high-stakes Senate Judiciary hearing last week where both Ford and Kavanaugh testified.
Democrats said the allegations were credible and deserved a full investigation, while Republicans accused Democrats of using uncorroborated allegations to scuttle or delay the nomination -- leading to a stream of angry flashpoints between lawmakers. The accusations eventually led to President Trump ordering an FBI investigation. Republicans who had seen the FBI’s report said the FBI had produced no credible corroboration of the allegations.
On those accusations, Collins said the Senate would be "ill-served in the long-term if we abandon the presumption of innocence and fairness, as tempting as it may be." She pointed to what she saw as inconsistencies and lack of corroboration in Ford's story and said they fail to meet the "more likely than not" standard. She also said that those trying to defeat Kavanaugh's nomination "cared little if at all" about Ford's well being.
Collins also made reference to allegations by Julie Swetnick that Kavanaugh drugged girls and was present during gang rapes.
"This outlandish allegation was put forth without any credible supporting evidence and simply parroted public statements of others," she said. "That such an allegation can find its way into the Supreme Court process is a stark reminder of why the presumption of innocence is so ingrained in our American conscience."
Protesters clashed with Republican lawmakers in an effort to sway their votes, and initially appeared to have some success. Flake demanded the limited FBI investigation last week after being cornered in an elevator by screaming protesters moments before a Senate Judiciary Committee vote to recommend Kavanaugh’s nomination. Republicans and conservatives had pushed back, including putting out ads that suggested the fight over accusations against Kavanaugh had implications for men across America.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said early Friday that the vote was "a pivotal day for us here in the Senate."
"The ideals of justice that have served our nation for so long are on display," he said, calling the last two weeks a "disgraceful spectacle."
But Democrats had pointed to not only the sexual assault allegations, which they described but also questions about Kavanaugh’s temperament during the hearing last week and whether he had lied about his drinking during high school and college, and what certain references in his high school yearbook meant. They also sought to paint him as a justice that would swing the court deeply to the right.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-NY, accused Kavanaugh of being evasive in his answers during his confirmation hearings on key topics. He said his views are “deeply at odds with the progress America has made in the last century of jurisprudence and at odds with what most Americans believe.”
Fox News' Alex Pappas, Chad Pergram, Jason Donner, John Roberts and Mike Emanuel contributed to this report.

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Partisans predictably praise, pummel FBI's Kavanaugh probe

Nothing was more predictable than Republican senators embracing the FBI investigation of Brett Kavanaugh and Democrats denouncing it.
Hours after the findings were delivered to all 100 senators, Mitch McConnell made clear that he’s ready to push through the Supreme Court nominee based on a report that vindicates Kavanaugh, and Chuck Schumer made just as clear that he’ll keep attacking the report as woefully inadequate.
And President Trump naturally welcomed the findings of the investigation he ordered under pressure from Jeff Flake and other swing lawmakers, tweeting of his nominee that "this great life cannot be ruined by mean & despicable Democrats and totally uncorroborated allegations!"
The less-than-a-week probe was always a Hail Mary pass for Kavanaugh opponents, unlikely to break new ground in what was a limited background check, not a criminal investigation.
And with uncommitted senators such as Flake and Susan Collins expressing satisfaction with the report, Kavanaugh is virtually certain to join the high court.
Stripping away the rhetoric, the GOP hoped an FBI inquiry would provide political cover for voting to confirm Kavanaugh despite the sexual assault allegations by Christine Blasey Ford and others. And the Democrats hoped that the inquiry would turn up new evidence that would require further investigation or provide enough of a delay that new accusations might surface, tipping the scales against Kavanaugh.
FBI agents spoke to nine of the 10 witnesses they tried to reach. It's hard to fathom, at least as a matter of optics, why those witnesses didn't include Ford and Kavanaugh, even though they'd already testified. This gave the minority party an opportunity to dismiss the investigation and Ford's lawyers a chance to blast the bureau for rejecting their plea to have her questioned about what she says happened when she was 15.
Not even Democrats claimed the probe had unearthed new evidence of misconduct. Instead, they said the bureau's attempt was so limited that nothing of importance could be turned up. But the Republicans are exercised too, with Chuck Grassley lecturing reporters on their bias and Orrin Hatch decrying the process that Kavanaugh was put through.
The FBI did interview the second accuser, Deborah Ramirez, who told the New Yorker that despite her memory gaps, she concluded that Kavanaugh exposed himself at a party while they were students at Yale. Her lawyers ripped the bureau for not interviewing 20-plus witnesses about her allegations.
As for other stories that have burst into the news this past week, the Washington Post reported that the White House had restricted the FBI from examining his drinking habits or any discrepancy between his testimony and past alcohol consumption.
The likelihood that this limited investigation was going to derail the nomination was always extremely small. The question now is whether the lingering impact of this raw and ugly battle will linger over not just the midterms but the country’s cultural conversation.

Facebook executive's Kavanaugh support triggers backlash for Zuckerberg

Facebook's vice president of global public policy, Joel Kaplan, attended the Kavanaugh hearing last week. (Niall Carson/PA Images via Getty Images, File)

Hundreds of Facebook employees have criticized a top executive after he attended Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's hearing last week in a show of support for the federal judge, The Wall Street Journal reported late Thursday.
Joel Kaplan, Facebook's vice president of global public policy, is a longtime friend of Kavanaugh, whose nomination has been threatened by sexual misconduct allegations dating from his time in high school and college in the early 1980s. Kaplan attended the dramatic Sept. 27 Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in which lawmakers heard testimony from Kavanaugh and one of his accusers, Christine Blasey Ford.
The Journal reported that Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked about Kaplan's attendance at a weekly Q-and-A session with employees last Friday. Zuckerberg said that he wouldn't have made the same decision as Kaplan, but that the executive had not violated any company policies.

Joel Kaplan, third from left, listens to Brett Kavanaugh testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Sept. 27. (REUTERS/Jim Bourg)

However, Zuckerberg's response has failed to quell the furor, with employees taking to an internal discussion thread to criticized Kaplan's decision. That same Friday, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg said in an internal discussion board post that she had talked to the exec "about why I think it was a mistake for him to attend, given his role in the company.
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"We support people’s right to do what they want in their personal time but this was by no means a straightforward case," Sandberg added.
The Journal reported that Zuckerberg and other executives are planning a company town hall on Friday to address the matter, with Kaplan calling into the forum from Washington, D.C.
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Kaplan, who, like Kavanaugh, is a former official in the George W. Bush administration, apologized in an internal forum for what The Journal described as "surprising employees by his appearance," and said he did not expect his decision to be controversial.
"Sexual assault is an issue society has turned a blind eye to for far too long — compounding every victim’s pain," Facebook spokeswoman Roberta Thomson told the paper. "Our leadership team recognizes that they’ve made mistakes handling the events of the last week and we’re grateful for all the feedback from our employees."

As Kavanaugh vote looms, GOP Sen. Daines says he's going to daughter's wedding

Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont. told Fox News exclusively on Thursday that although he will walk his daughter down the aisle at her wedding in Montana on Saturday, his plans won't affect Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh's confirmation vote scheduled for the same day in Washington.
Speaking to host Shannon Bream on "Fox News @ Night," Daines said he personally called Kavanaugh Thursday evening and told him, "I'm going to be there to vote for you as needed."
He continued:  "I've got a wedding on Saturday. My goal this weekend is to walk my daughter down the aisle, and to see a new U.S. Supreme Court Justice put on the court."
Because Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., started a procedural clock Thursday evening, Republicans cannot technically delay the final confirmation vote on Saturday unless they secure the consent of all 100 senators. (50 affirmative votes are needed for Friday morning's procedural vote to invoke cloture, meaning to formally end debate and move forward to Saturday's final vote.)
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The GOP could, however, hold the session open for several hours, allowing Daines to vote late Saturday or even Sunday if needed. "Votes are held open all the time," Daines said.
He added: "The next most important vote is [Friday] at 10:30 [a.m. ET]. ... We're going to find out a lot tomorrow. And we've got a plan ready to go."

"My goal this weekend is to walk my daughter down the aisle, and to see a new U.S. Supreme Court Justice."
— Steve Daines, R-Mont.

Republicans command a narrow 51-49 majority in the Senate, and several key swing-vote senators haven't yet announced how they will vote on Kavanaugh.
But Daines said Thursday he hoped they would vote to confirm, adding that he spent three hours reviewing the FBI's confidential background check into Kavanaugh earlier in the day, and that "there's absolutely zero corroborating evidence to support" the sexual misconduct allegations against the nominee.
Daines’ office told Fox News that the timing of the FBI’s recent probe into sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh was fluid, meaning it was not known that there would be a conflict with his wedding until recently.
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Daines will be in attendance Friday morning when the Senate takes a vote to end debate on Kavanaugh's nomination.
Fox News’ Peter Doocy and Chad Pergram contributed to this report.