As questions swirl over whether the one-week FBI probe into allegations of sexual assault by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has already been effectively neutered by White House instructions to investigators as to what witnesses they are allowed to talk to and which lines of questioning are allowable and which are not, Kavanaugh's backers in and out of the Senate have based their continued support on the premise that they both find Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's allegations and Kavanaugh's furious denials equally credible, therefore nothing more can be done and the truth is, ultimately, unknowable. It is he said versus she said; since there are no witnesses other than victim and the two perpetrators, whatever crime may have taken place will forever go unsolved.
That's not quite true. In an excellent and lengthy rundown of Kavanaugh's specific responses and evasions during his Senate testimony, Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson notes that both we and investigators both already have a great deal of evidence with which to judge the credibility of Ford and Kavanaugh.
The existence of a “he said, she said” does not mean it’s impossible to figure out the truth. It means we have to examine what he said, and what she said, as closely as possible. If both parties speak with passion and clarity, but one of them says many inconsistent, evasive, irrational, and false things, while the other does not, then we actually have a very good indicator of which party is telling the truth. If a man claims to be innocent, but does things—like carefully manipulate words to avoid giving clear answers, or lie about the evidence—that you probably wouldn’t do if you were innocent, then testimony alone can substantially change our confidence in who to believe.It is an important and instructive piece, well worth reading: Kavanaugh's evasions during his Senate testimony were all crafted to serve specific purposes, painting Ford's testimony as implausible for a variety of different reasons, but each of those evasions has already been discredited by what few details we do know from the contemporary evidence. Kavanaugh’s evasions are constructed to grant him alibis to the assault that the evidence we do have demonstrably does not back up.
Kavanaugh insists he and Ford did not travel in the same social circles; his contemporaries describe this as false. Kavanaugh insists no small party took place like the one Ford described or with the friends Ford identified; his own calendar entries prove otherwise. Kavanaugh insists with much fury that he never drank to excess, or to the point of memory loss; numerous of his contemporaries disagree profoundly with that assertion.
But it is the way Kavanaugh massages the truth that's instructive. The word of note here is alibis. He is devoted to giving the appearance of having alibis that would render Ford's claims implausible, but his statements are at odds with even the evidence he himself presented:
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