WASHINGTON – Democrats reacted with anger Sunday as it became clear that the White House and Senate Republicans had imposed a narrow scope on the new FBI investigation into Judge Brett Kavanaugh, warning that the inquiry threatened to become a sham.
Sen. Mazie K. Hirono, a Hawaii Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, said on ABC’s “This Week” that any investigation that limits whom the FBI can interview and which leads agents can follow would be a “farce.”
Sen. 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.”
The White House agreed Friday to order the FBI to conduct a “limited” one-week supplemental background check of Kavanaugh after a small number of Republicans joined Democrats in demanding an investigation into accusations of sexual misconduct.
White House officials have asked the FBI to interview four witnesses, a typical request in a background check. No evidence has emerged that the White House has forbidden any investigative steps, and President Donald Trump has said he wants agents “to interview whoever they deem appropriate, at their discretion.”
In a tweet Sunday, Trump accused Democrats of playing politics and said they would never be satisfied with any inquiry.
“Wow! Just starting to hear the Democrats, who are only thinking Obstruct and Delay, are starting to put out the word that the ‘time’ and ‘scope’ of FBI looking into Judge Kavanaugh and witnesses is not enough,” he wrote. “Hello! For them, it will never be enough.”
Democrats have cast the initial list of those to be interviewed as falling short of a full examination of the allegations. The four witnesses are Mark Judge and P.J. Smyth, high school friends of Kavanaugh; Leland Keyser, a high school friend of one of Kavanaugh’s accusers, Christine Blasey Ford; and Deborah Ramirez, another of the judge’s accusers.
A lawyer for Blasey, who riveted the nation Thursday as she recounted before the Judiciary Committee what she said was a rape attempt by a drunken Kavanaugh when they were in high school, said Sunday that she had not been contacted by the FBI.
“We have not heard from the FBI despite repeated efforts to speak with them,” Debra S. Katz, the lawyer, said in a brief telephone interview Sunday morning.
Blasey testified last week that she was willing to cooperate with authorities. Kavanaugh has strenuously denied the accusations by Blasey and other accusers.
The inquiry set in motion last week is aimed at resolving the fierce national debate over Kavanaugh’s fitness to sit on the Supreme Court. But its abbreviated nature appears likely to disappoint his critics, who have insisted on a wide-ranging examination of his drinking and sexual habits as a high school and college student. Even Democratic senators who had acknowledged that the background check would be limited said Sunday that they were disappointed.
Officials said FBI agents were not making the kind of broad efforts that journalists have engaged in over the last several weeks to talk to anyone who might have information about Kavanaugh’s sexual conduct or drinking habits as a young man.
Instead, they said, the inquiry had been designed to examine the allegations of Blasey, a California university professor, and the assertion by Ramirez, a classmate of Kavanaugh at Yale University, that he had exposed himself to her.
The process of interviewing the four witnesses could be completed by as soon as Monday. While agents are free to follow up if they find evidence of criminal activity, the rules for background checks require that agents ask the White House if they want to expand the scope of their investigation or interview other witnesses.
Left off the list for interviews are former classmates of Kavanaugh who have publicly disputed his testimony about his drinking and partying while a high school student at Georgetown Preparatory School, an all-boys Catholic school in suburban Maryland, and later at Yale.
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, denied Sunday that the White House was playing any improper role in the process, saying that Don McGahn, the White House counsel, had “allowed the Senate to dictate” the terms of the investigation, and that Trump would stay out of it.
People familiar with the investigation said Republican senators had developed the list of four potential witnesses for the FBI to interview, and shared it with the White House.
“The Senate is dictating the terms,” Sanders said on “Fox News Sunday.” “They laid out the request, and we’ve opened it up. And as you heard the president say, do what you need to do, the FBI, this is what they do and we are out of the way and letting them do exactly that.”
In a tweet late Saturday night, Trump insisted that he had not put any limits on the witnesses the FBI could interview. While he did not dispute the small number of initial interviews, he appeared to suggest that the White House would not stop the FBI from pursuing leads on the two allegations of misconduct.
Sen. Susan Collins, a moderate Maine Republican whose vote could determine Kavanaugh’s fate, said Sunday that “I am confident that the FBI will follow up on any leads that result from the interviews.”
But as Democrats tried to sound alarms that the White House may be constraining the FBI’s work, one key member of the party indicated that if the Democrats won control of the House in November and Kavanaugh made it through the Senate, he would have no choice but to more fully investigate the claims against him.
“If he is on the Supreme Court and the Senate hasn’t investigated, the House will have to,” the lawmaker, Rep. Jerrold Nadler of New York, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, said on “This Week.” “We would have to investigate any credible allegations, certainly of perjury and other things that haven’t been properly looked into before.”
The Judiciary Committee is the body where impeachment inquiries for judges and other officials begin, and with the Democrats favorites to retake the House in November, Nadler could well be the panel’s chairman come January.
“We can’t have a justice on the Supreme Court for the next several decades who will be deciding questions of liberty, and life and death, and all kinds of things for the entire American people who has been credibly accused of sexual assaults, who has been credibly accused of various other things that – wrong things, including perjury,” Nadler said.
As acrimony among Republicans and Democrats seemed to only grow on Capitol Hill, a Republican, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, said his party should open an investigation of its own.
Graham, whose highly charged defense of Kavanaugh turned heads last week, dismissed the need to question witnesses about Kavanaugh’s youthful drinking. Instead, he called for an inquiry into Senate Democrats’ interactions with Blasey, accusing lawmakers across the aisle of betraying her trust by recommending that she hire a particular lawyer, leaking the existence of a letter she had written and disclosing the existence of an additional unrelated anonymous accusation against Kavanaugh.
“I think you’re trying to portray him as a stumbling, bumbling drunk gang rapist who during high school and college was Bill Cosby,” Graham said on “This Week.” “Six FBI background checks over the years would have uncovered this.”