Supreme Court Corruption (Formerly Clarence Thomas and the Billionaire) (1 Viewer)

[cuddlemonkey]

It seems that a billionaire GOP donor has spent a small fortune on vacations for Ginni and Clarence Thomas.

Clarence Thomas Secretly Accepted Luxury Trips From Major GOP Donor

Island-hopping on a superyacht. Private jet rides around the world. The undisclosed gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the Supreme Court. “It’s incomprehensible to me that someone would do this,” says one former judge.

www.propublica.org

 

[Taurus]

Maybe it was always obvious that the whole thing was a sham.

Back in 2018, when Christine Blasey Ford, Deborah Ramirez, and others accused then supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, the powerful testimony of Blasey Ford before the Senate judiciary committee briefly seemed like it might derail the nomination.

This was the height of #MeToo, remember: at the time, many women were coming forward with their own stories of sexual violence, and the accounts were numerous enough and had sufficient moral authority that powerful people felt it necessary to pretend that they cared.

Republican senators wanted to confirm Kavanaugh quickly: the judge, who was then seated on the DC circuit, would provide the crucial fifth vote to overturn Roe v Wade, as well as supporting efforts to enshrine various other Republican policy agendas into law.

Women, however, were causing a scene: two cornered then Arizona senator Jeff Flake in an elevator and screamed at him that he should be ashamed of himself.

On a live stream of the altercation that went viral on social media, it looked like he was. All this made things somewhat awkward for the Republicans: they wanted to vote for Kavanaugh, but they wanted political cover to do so.

This is where the FBI came in.

The FBI was tasked with investigating the allegations against Kavanaugh. The idea, or so we were told, was that the bureau would be competent and impartial: that they would get to the bottom of this. Tips poured into the FBI hotline.

There were multiple allegations against Kavanaugh, and witnesses to his alleged misconduct with women – a seemingly unending number of former college classmates who had seen a drunken Kavanaugh pull his penis out at Yale and shove it into a freshman’s face, for instance – were calling in with what they felt was urgent information about the judge’s character.

They depicted him as a boorish, drunken, groping misogynist, a man without dignity or self-awareness, who was patently unfit for the office to which he had been nominated.

Their mistake, maybe, was in thinking that it would matter. The FBI wrapped up their “investigation” within a week. They never even interviewed Blasey Ford.

On Tuesday, the office of Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island senator, released a report confirming what many of us who observed this fracas at the time already knew: there was no real investigation into Kavanaugh’s conduct.

Instead, the FBI allowed itself to be used as a prop in a bit of political theater, orchestrated by the Trump administration, which was designed not to uncover the truth of the sexual violence allegations against Kavanaugh, but to bury it……..

The FBI conducted a sham investigation into Brett Kavanaugh. Surprised? | Moira Donegan

The bureau shamefully allowed itself to be used as a prop in political theater, orchestrated by the Trump administration

www.theguardian.com

This is my shocked face.

 

[LA - L.A.]

Maybe it was always obvious that the whole thing was a sham.

Back in 2018, when Christine Blasey Ford, Deborah Ramirez, and others accused then supreme court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, the powerful testimony of Blasey Ford before the Senate judiciary committee briefly seemed like it might derail the nomination.

This was the height of #MeToo, remember: at the time, many women were coming forward with their own stories of sexual violence, and the accounts were numerous enough and had sufficient moral authority that powerful people felt it necessary to pretend that they cared.

Republican senators wanted to confirm Kavanaugh quickly: the judge, who was then seated on the DC circuit, would provide the crucial fifth vote to overturn Roe v Wade, as well as supporting efforts to enshrine various other Republican policy agendas into law.

Women, however, were causing a scene: two cornered then Arizona senator Jeff Flake in an elevator and screamed at him that he should be ashamed of himself.

On a live stream of the altercation that went viral on social media, it looked like he was. All this made things somewhat awkward for the Republicans: they wanted to vote for Kavanaugh, but they wanted political cover to do so.

This is where the FBI came in.

The FBI was tasked with investigating the allegations against Kavanaugh. The idea, or so we were told, was that the bureau would be competent and impartial: that they would get to the bottom of this. Tips poured into the FBI hotline.

There were multiple allegations against Kavanaugh, and witnesses to his alleged misconduct with women – a seemingly unending number of former college classmates who had seen a drunken Kavanaugh pull his penis out at Yale and shove it into a freshman’s face, for instance – were calling in with what they felt was urgent information about the judge’s character.

They depicted him as a boorish, drunken, groping misogynist, a man without dignity or self-awareness, who was patently unfit for the office to which he had been nominated.

Their mistake, maybe, was in thinking that it would matter. The FBI wrapped up their “investigation” within a week. They never even interviewed Blasey Ford.

On Tuesday, the office of Sheldon Whitehouse, a Rhode Island senator, released a report confirming what many of us who observed this fracas at the time already knew: there was no real investigation into Kavanaugh’s conduct.

Instead, the FBI allowed itself to be used as a prop in a bit of political theater, orchestrated by the Trump administration, which was designed not to uncover the truth of the sexual violence allegations against Kavanaugh, but to bury it……..

The FBI conducted a sham investigation into Brett Kavanaugh. Surprised? | Moira Donegan

The bureau shamefully allowed itself to be used as a prop in political theater, orchestrated by the Trump administration

www.theguardian.com

This is why Trump and Republicans keep whining that Biden and Democrats have weaponized the FBI. They are, yet again for the tredecillionth time, projecting their own bad, guilty behavior onto others.