White House Says FBI Has Cleared Kavanaugh From Sexual Misconduct Accusations

The White House is “fully confident” the FBI probe into President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has found nothing that should prevent him from being confirmed to the Supreme Court, The New York Times is reporting.

The White House sent the FBI documents, material that was conveyed to Capitol Hill in the middle of the night, to the Senate early Thursday for review, just a few hours after Senate Republicans voted to move to final approval of Judge Kavanaugh’s nomination. according to The Times report.

“This is the last addition to the most comprehensive review of a Supreme Court nominee in history, which includes extensive hearings, multiple committee interviews, over 1,200 questions for the record and over a half million pages of documents,” Raj Shah, a White House press secretary, said in a series of three tweets. “With this additional information, the White House is fully confident the Senate will vote to confirm Judge Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court.”

The White House didn’t elaborate further, but The Times reported that an official briefed on the FBI probe said the bureau contacted 10 people and interviewed nine of them. It is unclear why the 10th person was not interviewed. After reviewing the material, the White House concluded that the interviews did not corroborate sexual misconduct accusations against Kavanaugh, according to The Times.

Senators will review the documents on Thursday ahead of a likely vote on whether to confirm Kavanaugh over the weekend. The Senate is set to cast an initial vote on Kavanaugh’s confirmation on Friday and possibly a final vote as early as Saturday, as per The Times.

The accusations against Kavanaugh go back to his time in high school and college and have delayed Trump’s effort to elevate the conservative appeals court justice to the highest court in the land. After a contentious public hearing last week, Trump ordered the FBI to look into the allegations against his nominee, but gave the agency less than a week, prompting Democrats to voice concern that the FBI investigation had been too narrow.

During last week’s hearing, Christine Blasey Ford, 51, a university professor in Northern California, testified that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when they were teenagers at a social gathering in high school. Deborah Ramirez, 53, who works for a county housing department in Boulder, Colorado, has alleged that he exposed his genitals to her during a party in college, though she did not testify last week.

Ramirez has claimed the Bureau didn’t take the necessary steps to substantiate her claims during its investigation, according to The New Yorker.

“I am very alarmed, first, that I was denied an F.B.I. investigation for five days, and then, when one was granted, that it was given on a short timeline and that the people who were key to corroborating my story have not been contacted,” Ramirez said. “I feel like I’m being silenced.”