Brett Kavanaugh

[Foggy]

Instead, those tips were handed to the White House.

Which is why I have exactly zero sympathy for the FBI, now that Trump turned on them like a cornered rat.

[RTH10260]

Instead, those tips were handed to the White House.

Which is why I have exactly zero sympathy for the FBI, now that Trump turned on them like a cornered rat.

IIRC the WH of the former guy told them they would perform the vetting, and of course the top FBI guy was a stooge of the former guy.

[Kriselda Gray]

IIRC, The FBI essentially works for the White House when doing background checks and such on nominees, and the WH is in control of what happens with any information they find. In this case, the WH ordered them to turn over all the tips to them somthey could follow up, and the FBI had no option but to comply. I wish I could remember where I read or heard that, but it was a long time ago when the non-investigation first came to light. It may have been one of the former FBI guys who serve as talking heads for MSNBC.

[p0rtia]

[raison de arizona]

Here’s a press release from Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) that does a good job of explaining it: https://www.whitehouse.senate.gov/news/ ... estigation

tl;dr is that the White House was the requesting agency, so everything went to them to determine what to investigate.

[neonzx]

IIRC, The FBI essentially works for the White House when doing background checks and such on nominees, and the WH is in control of what happens with any information they find. In this case, the WH ordered them to turn over all the tips to them somthey could follow up, and the FBI had no option but to comply. I wish I could remember where I read or heard that, but it was a long time ago when the non-investigation first came to light. It may have been one of the former FBI guys who serve as talking heads for MSNBC.

That's how it is supposed to work. The FBI performs the background checks, interviews with family, associates, friends.... digs through financials, business dealings, etc. The results are passed onto the requesting agency (in this case, would have been the WH). It should be done the same as a national security clearance application. The FBI passes the findings on but does not make the final determination. The agency which requested the checks does.

[Foggy]

The FBI was tasked with an investigation, and it appears that it did not investigate.

Four thousand five hundred or more tips came to the FBI. It did not interview any of the witnesses. Instead, it simply turned over the tips, uninvestigated, to Trump and his evil minions.

And collecting tips and turning them over without interviewing any of the witnesses is not an investigation.

Of course, none of it matters in the real world, because Susan Collins blah blah blah ...

... but if the FBI had investigated and somehow the truth emerged about the judge who loved beer (and helpless women) she would have been very concerned before voting to confirm him.

[raison de arizona]

BREAKING: Protestors are marching in front of Justice Kavanaugh’s home on the 50th anniversary of the Roe v Wade decision that was overturned last summer.

[Kriselda Gray]

The FBI was tasked with an investigation, and it appears that it did not investigate.

No, what I meant was that they actually weren't asked to investigate - they were asked to gather information and give it to the White House, who was basically their "client.' That's what I remember hearing/reading - it stood out because it struck me as so odd-sounding.

[Danraft]

More scary would be if that the forwarded info about “tips” had an endpoint that those that made complaining “noise” were then targeted for other harassment.
I would not be surprised if the Trump admin asked for this.

The FBI was tasked with an investigation, and it appears that it did not investigate.

No, what I meant was that they actually weren't asked to investigate - they were asked to gather information and give it to the White House, who was basically their "client.' That's what I remember hearing/reading - it stood out because it struck me as so odd-sounding.

[Foggy]

The very fact that more than four thousand five hundred tips came in was, y'know, maybe a little tiny bit of a hint of a clue that there was something seriously wrong with the man. Many FBI agents are also attorneys, sworn to uphold the Constitution.

And they helped put a fucking rapist on the Supreme Court of the United States of America. To this very minute, my blood boils just thinking about it.

So we can talk about "just doing their job" and so forth, but if I had been an agent involved with that, I hope I would have quit and gone public before the bastard was confirmed. I'd be damned proud to give up my job for Christine Blasey Ford and the other ladies he sexually assaulted.

But not one of them decided that upholding the Constitution was more important than their paychecks.

What would have happened if an FBI agent came out and said, before the final vote, that the Bureau had received more than 4,500 tips, and none of them were investigated, and instead they were given to the White House for political reprisals against the witnesses? Which, there was nothing stopping Trump from doing.

[sugar magnolia]

The very fact that more than four thousand five hundred tips came in was, y'know, maybe a little tiny bit of a hint of a clue that there was something seriously wrong with the man. Many FBI agents are also attorneys, sworn to uphold the Constitution.

And they helped put a fucking rapist on the Supreme Court of the United States of America. To this very minute, my blood boils just thinking about it.

So we can talk about "just doing their job" and so forth, but if I had been an agent involved with that, I hope I would have quit and gone public before the bastard was confirmed. I'd be damned proud to give up my job for Christine Blasey Ford and the other ladies he sexually assaulted.

But not one of them decided that upholding the Constitution was more important than their paychecks.

What would have happened if an FBI agent came out and said, before the final vote, that the Bureau had received more than 4,500 tips, and none of them were investigated, and instead they were given to the White House for political reprisals against the witnesses? Which, there was nothing stopping Trump from doing.

4000 tips sounds like a lot, but it's not really. The college student murders in Moscow received over 10,000, and it's not unusual for a carjacking or armed robbery to receive 1,000 or more.

My understanding about the Kavanaugh "investigation" is that the FBI didn't investigate anything. They simply passed the info received off to the WH. That's the same way CrimeStoppers works too. They just forward the tips to whoever is in charge of the investigation. I am NOT a fan of the FBI, but they can't really be faulted in this case.

[Foggy]

But Moooooommmm!

Oh, alright. I will give them a break. I'm a lifelong despiser of the FBI.

But I trust you. So I will climb down on this one.

[raison de arizona]

The Supreme Court Has a Clear Intellectual Lightweight

Justice Brett Kavanaugh is the most powerful and least influential member of the U.S. Supreme Court today. As the median justice, he is, in theory, the swing vote: He sits at the center, though he is not a centrist, and can create a majority with the four justices to his left or right. Yet, unlike past swing votes, Kavanaugh rarely authors important or notable opinions of the court. Actually, he doesn’t write very much at all, penning the fewest words of any justice over the most recent term. It is difficult to describe his ideology, or even attribute to him a clear legal philosophy. The best that can be said of Kavanaugh may be that he is a lot like Chief Justice John Roberts—the two men are the court’s most reliable pairing—minus the chief justice’s fluency, wit, and shrewdness.

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. During his 12 years on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, Kavanaugh styled himself as a brainy operator who combined intellectual firepower with affable moderation, in rhetoric if not in substance. He wanted to be the conservative whom liberals could respect—Justice Antonin Scalia without the volcanic temper—and the high-minded jurist who could sell right-wing legal theories to the public as common-sense constitutional principles. Over the past five years, that version of Brett Kavanaugh has receded from view. In its place has emerged a man with seemingly few fixed convictions and even fewer interesting things to say. To the extent that his colleagues think about him at all, they seem to view him as a fixer who can cobble together five votes for a diaphanous majority opinion that decides almost nothing.

Consider the justice’s majority opinions from this most recent term. He wrote just one that might be deemed major, U.S. v. Texas, which rejected Texas’ standing to challenge the Biden administration’s immigrant enforcement guidelines. The opinion is 14 pages long, shorter than Justice Neil Gorsuch’s concurrence (19 pages) and Justice Samuel Alito’s dissent (29 pages).

Length, of course, is no proxy for quality. But Kavanaugh’s opinion is remarkably thin gruel. He rested his reasoning on a single sentence from an obscure case decided in 1973, transforming it into a “fundamental Article III principle” that had, apparently, been hiding in plain sight all along. He then carved a slew of exceptions to that principle, rendering its application to future disputes maddeningly unclear.

A cynic might think that Kavanaugh started with the conclusion that Texas can’t seize control over immigration enforcement from the president, then worked backward to give Biden the narrowest possible win.

Paywall: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/202 ... eight.html