Mollie Hemingway: Republicans Must Hold Democrats, Media Accountable for Brett Kavanaugh Smears

Mario Tama/Getty Images
Mario Tama/Getty Images

Author and Fox News contributor Mollie Hemingway told Breitbart News Daily on Monday morning that the New York Times had repeated the media’s past misbehavior in publishing a new allegation against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh on Saturday while hiding exculpatory information in their possession.

“These reporters published a story that didn’t include information that even they had in their own book,” Hemingway, who is also a senior editor at TheFederalist.com, told Breitbart News editor-in-chief Alex Marlow.

“They themselves concede that the woman had never said anything about this publicly, and that through several friends … she had denied any knowledge of what this person was talking about. They also hit the fact that the person making the allegation is a Clinton-connected attorney.”

The New York Times‘ Robin Pogrebin & Kate Kelly reported Saturday, in an article that appears in Sunday’s print edition:

We also uncovered a previously unreported story about Mr. Kavanaugh in his freshman year that echoes Ms. [Deborah] Ramirez’s allegation. A classmate, Max Stier, saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student. Mr. Stier, who runs a nonprofit organization in Washington, notified senators and the F.B.I. about this account, but the F.B.I. did not investigate and Mr. Stier has declined to discuss it publicly. (We corroborated the story with two officials who have communicated with Mr. Stier.)

The article was adapted from Pogrebin and Kelly’s new book,  The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation.

However, Hemingway and Carrie Severino of the Judicial Crisis Network pointed out that the book also indicated that the alleged victim did not remember the incident. Severino also tweeted that the person making the accusation, Max Stier, “was a member of Bill Clinton’s defense team back during the Lewinsky investigation.”

Several leading Democrats called for Kavanaugh’s impeachment for perjury, including several presidential candidates: Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro. Others claimed the FBI investigation of Kavanaugh had been suppressed.

By late Sunday, the Times had been forced to add a correction (original emphasis and italics):

Editors’ Note: Sept. 15, 2019

An earlier version of this article, which was adapted from a forthcoming book, did not include one element of the book’s account regarding an assertion by a Yale classmate that friends of Brett Kavanaugh pushed his penis into the hand of a female student at a drunken dorm party. The book reports that the female student declined to be interviewed and friends say that she does not recall the incident. That information has been added to the article.

Hemingway told Marlow that the Times authors could not back up the allegations against Kavanaugh by lead accuser Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, either.

Hemingway and Carrie Severino wrote their own book about the Kavanaugh confirmation, Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court.

“If the media keep on doing this stuff and nobody holds them accountable, it’s going to happen again — and it does. That’s what happened this weekend,” Hemingway said, noting that the Times ran “exact same playbook” as the media did during the confirmation hearings, with left-wing media repeating the claim and Democrats over-reacting.

Hemingway also faulted Republicans for not holding Democrats accountable for using false allegations during the confirmation hearings, and noted there had been criminal referrals for some of the false allegations that had not yet been followed through.

She noted that another Times piece on the Kavanaugh allegations, focusing on the calls for impeachment, did not include the editor’s note explaining that the original story had been debunked by the authors’ own book.

Hemingway said she had been motivated to write her own book by the desire to record the media’s misconduct.

For Kavanaugh’s accusers, for Democrats, and for the media, Hemingway told Marlow, the main motivation had been protecting abortion.

“Not only was this battle about abortion, but every contentious battle about the Supreme Court is quite obviously about abortion.” She noted that the attorney for Ford admitted recently that she, and Ford, had been motivated by their pro-choice views. She added that the Times authors made a similar admission.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News. He earned an A.B. in Social Studies and Environmental Science and Public Policy from Harvard College, and a J.D. from Harvard Law School. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. He is also the co-author of How Trump Won: The Inside Story of a Revolution, which is available from Regnery. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.

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