Donald Trump and Republicans have intentionally created confusion around whether the FBI is carrying out a full investigation of sexual assault allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, and who the agency is and is not allowed to interview. It’s safe to say, though, that the confusion is designed to hide the degree to which Republicans have tied the FBI’s hands—and former FBI agents and Senate Democrats alike are calling BS.
Greg Sargent talked to former FBI agents:
“It’s not an investigation if the FBI is going to accept the dictates of the White House in terms of who you can interview and who you can’t,” John Mindermann, a former FBI special agent who investigated the Watergate break-in, told me. Mindermann added that the idea of such a limited investigation is “ridiculous” and that if this holds, “it would be unprofessional, it would be grossly incomplete, and it would be unfair to the American public.”
Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI), meanwhile, said that such a limited investigation would be a “farce,” and:
Senator Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat who is also on the committee, described what she said was micromanaging from the White House: “You can’t interview this person, you can’t look at this time period, you can only look at these people from one side of the street from when they were growing up.”
“I mean, come on,” she said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
Republicans don’t want us to know, but while they may be able to keep the FBI from talking to people who were witnesses to Kavanaugh’s drinking, his behavior around women, and what all those words in his yearbook entry really meant, they can’t keep those people from going to the press to report that the FBI passed them over. If we have a long list of witnesses who weren’t questioned, we’ll know something about how bad this ridiculous farce of an investigation was—and that in turn will reveal a lot about how careful Republicans were to shield Kavanaugh (and themselves) from a real investigation.
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