The New York Times has faced criticism for how it handled new allegations against Brett Kavanaugh. Now, President Donald Trump is telling the Supreme Court justice to strike back.
In a Sunday tweet, Trump accused the Times of “trying to destroy and influence Justice Kavanaugh, a very good man” and said the paper “should be fully exposed” for doing so, Mediaite reports.
“They are trying to destroy and influence Justice Kavanaugh, a very good man.” @LindseyGrahamSC 100% correct, and they should be fully exposed for what they are!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 22, 2019
Trump later decried efforts “to make someone [Justice Kavanaugh] into an evil person when they don’t have the information to back it up,” characterizing the story as “a false hoax” before urging Kavanaugh to “sue The Failing New York Times for all they are worth!”
“The Failing New York Times”
Earlier this month, The New York Times published an accusation from long-time Democratic figure Max Stier, a classmate of Kavanaugh’s at Yale who says that while attending college with the now-justice, he 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.”
The story also appears in The Education of Brett Kavanaugh: An Investigation, a book written by the Times’ article’s authors.
But despite being the ones who wrote the book, the reporters left out an important detail: no one has corroborated Stier’s account, and friends of the purported victim, who declined to be interviewed, have said she doesn’t recall the events in question.
After columnist Mollie Hemingway pointed out this glaring omission, an editor’s note was added to the Times piece, according to Fox News.
The correction read:
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.
More lackluster allegations
That’s a pretty big error for such a major newspaper, and the article’s authors later blamed their editors for the omission. But this wasn’t the first charge against Kavanaugh to fall apart under scrutiny.
The justice was at one point accused of orchestrating multiple gang rapes by a woman named Julie Swetnick, according to NBC News. But The Washington Times reports that a Senate report uncovered material that was damaging to Swetnick’s credibility. (This, not to mention the fact that Swetnick was represented by disgraced attorney Michael Avenatti.)
Indeed, no criminal charges have come from these latest allegations against Kavanaugh, or any others he has endured. Still, Kavanaugh hasn’t pursued legal action thus far, and he has yet to make a comment on the president’s remarks.
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