Piece by Painful Piece — Taking Down Kavanaugh
Back when Ken Starr was sniffing around for dirt on Bill Clinton, Brett Kavanaugh was one of his most aggressive hounds. Together they routed around in the trash for more than four years, spending in excess of forty million taxpayer dollars in the process. Over the course of their inquiry, they looked into real-estate deals, sexual relationships, supposed extramarital relationships for both the President AND the First Lady — and when that wasn’t enough, they even tried to pin a murder on the First Family.
In the end, they found a blowjob.
When all that was going on, I was a teacher in Brooklyn and I’d often joke with my students that they could find more dirt on me by heading to my local bar, buying a few rounds for the regulars and making sure to tip the bartender. Four years and forty million dollars with the Starr Investigation. For all the Republican bullshit about waste and abuse, THAT is government inefficiency in action.
Now, you have to imagine that at some point in the process, the investigators realized they were chasing a rabbit down a deep, deep hole. You have to imagine that some of them argued for cooling their ague, because even on a team of obvious partisans, some are more radical than others. If that is the case, that voice of reason would have been barked down by Brett Kavanaugh and his more rabid allies on the hunt.
One of the weirdest angles of the Starr Investigation was its fixation on the death of Vince Foster, longtime friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Even after an investigation by federal police and a review of evidence by a conservative Congressman concluded that Foster, who suffered from depression, had committed suicide, Brett Kavanaugh urged Starr to open a “full-fledged investigation” of the affair, to determine if he was, in fact, killed — MURDERED — on the orders of the Clintons themselves.
As was well-reported recently by Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz in the New York Times, Kavanaugh drew his theories about Foster’s supposed murder from wingnuts on the right, such as Ambrose Evans-Pritchard — a loon who also posited that the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma by Timothy McVeigh was actually the result of an FBI operation.
Kavanaugh’s theory posited that Foster was being blackmailed by Israel over a Swiss bank account, and that his murder had actually been committed IN the White House, whereupon his body was rolled in a carpet and moved to the park where he was subsequently found. Moreover, there was, according to Kavanaugh, a mysterious blond hair found on Foster’s body that needed to be run to ground.
To pursue these lines of “reasoning,” Kavanaugh, per the Wilnetz report, “. . . investigated the Swiss bank account connection, down to examining Mr. Foster’s American Express bills for flights to Switzerland. He meticulously examined the White House carpets, old and new. (By now, Mr. Foster had been dead four years.) He sent investigators in search of follicle specimens from Mr. Foster’s bereft, blond, teenage daughter.”
They ultimately secured from her a sample. Of her hair. Because Brett Kavanaugh thought her father had been MURDERED by Hillary and Bill Clinton. Really.
Just imagine that as you calculate your concern for the violations of privacy Brett Kavanaugh is now suffering. How fucking gross.
When all of that nonsense came to nothing, Kavanaugh — and Starr — were only emboldened. One supposes there is a certain “in for a penny, in for a pound” reasoning to it all. Such things might tend to happen when you begin your investigation with conclusions.
Anyway, as luck would have it for the hounds, a politically motivated civil servant named Linda Tripp had secretly recorded conversations with Monica Lewinsky, in which Lewinsky admitted having a private, consensual sexual relationship with President Clinton. This was problematic, because Lewinsky had denied this relationship under oath when questioned about another part of the “scandal,” and so the unintended confession to her supposed friend was an admission of perjury. Thus began the whole unravelling nightmare of the blue dress.
I implore you to remember that personal betrayal of friendship by Linda Tripp when Lindsey Graham pouts about Professor Christine Blasey Ford’s letter to Senator Feinstein being leaked to the press. That outrage, of course, is strategic. As one of the “House Managers” of Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial in the Senate, then Representative Graham never whined once about that breach of privacy, ethics and personal decency. Not once. He did, however, argue strongly that any sort of a lie under oath, even if it was about a private sexual encounter, was a High Crime and worthy of both impeachment and removal from office.
And he did it in that particular voice that one Twitter-genius named Elon James recently remarked, “sounds like a Whites-only water fountain.”
But before we would end up with Lindsey making his arguments to the Senate, the whole sordid affair would need to be rooted out by Brett Kavanaugh and his team of witch hunters — some of whom it seems were getting cold feet about the levels of personal destruction into which the investigation was descending.
But Brett Kavanaugh would have none of that. Rather, he wrote a memo to the boss stating that “After reflecting this evening, I am strongly opposed to giving the President any ‘break’ in the questioning regarding the details of the Lewinsky relationship…I have tried hard to bend over backwards and to be fair to him and to think of all reasonable defenses to his pattern of behavior. In the end, I am convinced that there really are none. The idea of going easy on him at the questioning is thus abhorrent to me.”
He further argued that President Clinton “. . . should be made to account for all of that and to defend his actions. It may not be our job to impose sanctions on him — but it is our job to make his pattern of revolting behavior clear — piece by painful piece…”
“Piece by painful piece.”
And, by God, he did. The Starr Report included the most graphic depictions of every detail of the sex between Clinton and Lewinsky. I do not suggest you read it. The entire passage is porngraphic and a public violation of them both. It could only have been conducted, transcribed and printed by men who enjoy — like the Inquisitor Priests before them — the sexual power of feeling like you have someone totally under your control.
Sound like anyone you know? Anyone recently in the news?
And so, we return to the beginning. A generation ago, a young Brett Kavanaugh was personally responsible for a large part of the fully unnecessary debasement of the national debate and the destruction of a young woman’s life. He was personally responsible for wasting tens of millions of dollars of taxpayer money to determine that sometimes people lie about deeply personal moments in their lives that they cannot possibly imagine have anything to do with the public debate.
And now, Kavanaugh himself has obviously done the exact same thing. Leaving aside all the allegations of sexual misconduct, he has lied — obviously and absurdly — about his drinking. He has lied — obviously and absurdly — about the gross and indefensible things he wrote in his high school yearbook. He has lied, obviously and absurdly, casually and easily, just as he has squirmed underneath the lens of a nation investigating his personal life, “piece by painful piece.”
From all this, a few conclusion can be drawn.
1. Even for Presidents and well-heeled judges from Georgetown Prep, Yale, and the Tits and Clits Society — the world can come at you mighty fucking fast.
2. When karma does catch up with individuals conditioned to skating by dint of their privilege and position, they will lie with the ease of apple-bearing snakes. Then it is up to us to hold them accountable.
3. Legal investigations into such men are ALWAYS political. Sometimes the prosecutors attack — like in the case of President Clinton and the Starr Investigation. Sometimes they defend — like in the current case of Brett Kavanaugh.
4. But beneath all that, the truth CAN be discovered — and it won’t take years or cost millions of dollars. And so I make a public plea to the political journalists working this beat: If you want to know about Brett Kavanaugh’s sordid history of drunken belligerence and shitty treatment of women, get off your asses and find out where he “held court” on Friday night for the past twenty years in DC. Find out who was behind the stick when took a vacation to whatever Caribbean Island rich white guys prefer over Jamaica. Ask around to see if the guy was ever in Vegas. Get your editors to pad your expense account for a weekend, and start buying rounds for the regulars.
People. Will. Talk.
This guy deserves all the shit coming to him. Honestly, he deserves far more than he’ll ever get, no matter what the press digs up. Still, if you’re in the Fourth Estate and you’ve got that billet, bring it. And bring it hard.
And remember, bartenders work for tips.
Michael Tallon is an independent writer from Upstate New York who lives in Antigua, Guatemala. He is currently working on a nonfiction book detailing his experiences with a rare genetic disorder than nearly cost him his life in 2015. Follow him at Twitter.com/MichaelXTallon.
