Smith was also a member of the Federalist Society, which strongly supported Kavanaugh’s supreme court nomination, and appears to have a professional relationship with the Federalist Society’s co-founder, Leonard Leo, whom he thanked in the acknowledgments of his book Under God: George Washington and the Question of Church and State. Smith was a friend and former colleague of the judiciary committee’s then lead counsel, Mike Davis. “Instead it handed the information over to the White House, allowing those who supported Kavanaugh to falsely claim that the FBI found no wrongdoing,” they said.ĬORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misspelled the last name of FBI Assistant Director Jill Tyson.The suggestion that Kavanaugh was the victim of mistaken identity was sent to the judiciary committee by a Colorado-based attorney named Joseph C Smith Jr, according to a non-redacted copy of a 2018 email obtained by the Guardian. The lawyers said that the FBI had refused to interview Ford and “failed to act on the 4,500 tips it received about then-nominee Kavanaugh.” Thursday, Debra Katz and Lisa Banks, attorneys for Ford, released a statement calling the FBI’s investigation a “sham and a major institutional failure.” The staffer said that instead of providing the Senate with the FBI’s analysis of the relevant tips, the White House sent all the tips to the senators who were only able to read them in a secure room without the benefit of taking notes. “If the FBI was not authorized to or did not follow up on any of the tips that it received from the tip line, it is difficult to understand the point of having a tip line at all,” they said.Ī Democratic Senate staffer affiliated with Judiciary Committee acknowledged that the entire universe of tips was provided to senators at the time but that until the letter from the FBI last month, the senators were unaware that the FBI had engaged in a process to determine which tips were relevant. “The admissions in your letter corroborate and explain numerous credible accounts by individuals and firms that they had contacted the FBI with information ‘highly relevant to … allegations’ of sexual misconduct by Justice Kavanaugh, only to be ignored,” they wrote in a letter back to the FBI. The letter prompted a furious response from Whitehouse and six other Democratic senators on the Judiciary Committee. “The authorities, policies and procedures relied on by the FBI to conduct are not the same as the authorities, policies, and procedures used to investigate criminal matters,” Tyson wrote. She said that pursuant to a memo of understanding between the Justice Department and the White House in 2010, the FBI does not reopen background investigations unless it is “specifically instructed to do so by the requesting entity.” The FBI has said repeatedly it was not conducting a criminal investigation into Kavanaugh’s conduct. Tyson reiterated comments that FBI Director Christopher Wray made in past congressional testimony: that the FBI serves as an “investigative service provider” for federal background investigations, and that its role in the Kavanaugh matter was to respond to requests from the White House counsel. Don McGahn served as White House counsel at the time and he did not immediately return a request for comment. Tyson said relevant information was provided to the Office of the White House Counsel that served as the requesting entity. In the letter, Assistant Director Jill Tyson said that Kavanaugh’s nomination was the first time that the FBI set up a tip line for a nominee undergoing Senate confirmation and that the tips included phone calls and electronic submissions. Major 6-3 rulings foreshadow a sharper Supreme Court right turn Top row: Chief Justice John Roberts, Associate Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito bottom row: Associate Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett
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