Does Sheldon Whitehouse Think CNN Is Part of the ‘Right-Wing Attack Machine’?
Whitehouse claims senators weren’t shown all the tips the FBI received about Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. CNN has, in no uncertain terms, reported otherwise.
Whitehouse claims senators weren’t shown all the tips the FBI received about Brett Kavanaugh in 2018. CNN has, in no uncertain terms, reported otherwise.
D emocratic senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island released a one-minute video on Tuesday in which he (implicitly) responds to National Review’s reporting about the FBI tip-line that was opened up during the 2018 Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.
On July 22, the New York Times reported that Senate Democrats were outraged to learn in a letter from the FBI that the agency had received 4,500 tips about Kavanaugh during a supplemental background investigation, and had passed the “relevant” tips on to the White House. “The letter left uncertain whether the FBI itself followed up on the most compelling leads,” the Times reported.
But as National Review reported on July 23, the Times’s report on the tip-line left out several crucial details: “(1) The FBI’s supplemental investigation was always supposed to be limited in time and scope; (2) a summary of all the tips the FBI received was available to all 100 U.S. senators; and (3) we have good reason to believe that none of the supposedly ‘compelling leads’ were actually compelling at all.”
More on the tip-line summary available to all 100 U.S. senators:
Mike Davis, who served as chief counsel for nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee during the Kavanaugh hearings, tells National Review that there was a summary of all 4,500 tips in the FBI’s report, which was available to all 100 U.S. senators.
“They printed out the entire tip-line summary,” says Davis. “Every senator had full access to read those things if they wanted to.”
Davis makes a crucial point about Senate Democrats now expressing outrage: “If there was anything that caught their attention, they could have flagged it for further investigation.”
“Every whack-job in the world called into that thing. That’s why there were 4,500 [tips],” says Davis. “Grassley’s team went through the entire tip-line. It was nonsense.” Davis worked under then-chairman Chuck Grassley on the committee and now runs the Article 3 Project, a conservative group that focuses on the judiciary.
A Republican senator who reviewed the FBI’s report confirms Davis’s description of the tip-line summary. “There was nothing in there . . . nothing anywhere providing a shred of corroboration” of an existing allegation or a new allegation, the senator tells National Review.
Senator Whitehouse now claims that the “right-wing attack machine” is trying to “cloud” the issue. “No, there was no summary of what came through the tip line that we were given. The White House didn’t give us a summary. The FBI didn’t give us a summary,” Whitehouse said in a video published Tuesday on Twitter.
One has to ask: Does Whitehouse consider CNN and Democratic Senate aides to be part of the “right-wing attack machine”? “A Democratic Senate staffer affiliated with [the] Judiciary Committee acknowledged that the entire universe of tips was provided to senators at the time,” CNN’s Ariane de Vogue reported on July 23.
In Whitehouse’s short video, he goes on to say that senators “had brief, brief access to a room full of papers, no ability to take notes” — but at no point does he acknowledge that that “room full of papers” did in fact include a summary of all the tips about Kavanaugh received by the FBI.
Mike Davis, the former Republican Judiciary Committee staffer quoted above, noted on Twitter that senior staff on both sides of the aisle also had access to the full tip-line summary:
FYI, 10 Senate Judiciary aides (6 Grassley; 4 Feinstein) had full access & could’ve read every one of those 4,500 @FBI “tips.”
(I was one of them.)
Every whack-job in the world called into the @FBI.
If there were any credible allegations, the staff also could’ve flagged them.
— 🇺🇸 Mike Davis 🇺🇸 (@mrddmia) July 28, 2021
The anonymous Democratic Senate aide who spoke to CNN and acknowledged the “entire universe of tips was provided to senators” tried to make a more nuanced argument than Whitehouse:
A 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 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.
The Democratic Senate staffer gave the impression that there was some small list of credible or relevant tips the FBI sorted out from thousands of obviously bogus ones. But a former senior official in the White House counsel’s office told National Review that the FBI provided the White House with one long list of tips that did not distinguish between relevant tips and irrelevant ones.
“There was one list,” the former White House official said, emphasizing that it wasn’t as though the FBI “put an asterisk” on any of the tips to mark them as relevant. “I was under the assumption that we had gotten the full tip-line and it went right over to the Senate.”
Democratic staffers and their allies in the press appear to be reading way too much into the FBI’s June 30, 2021, letter. The FBI official wrote:
The FBI received over 4,500 tips, including phone calls and electronic submissions. The Security Division section handling the [background investigation] and supplemental background investigations provided all relevant tips to the Office of White House Counsel (as the requesting entity).
So, the FBI said it provided “all relevant tips” to the White House, but did not bother to define “relevant.” A former senior official in the White House counsel’s office says that the FBI provided “one list” summarizing thousands of tips — a list that did not mark certain tips as relevant or irrelevant — and that entire list was included in the FBI report available to all 100 senators and some senior staffers.
Could the FBI’s definition of “relevant” tips be as simple “as all tips that mentioned Kavanaugh’s name and weren’t duplicative”? That’s just one hypothesis, but if something like it turns out to be the case when the FBI responds to the Senate Democrats’ request for clarification, then the Senate Democrats pushing this story will look more foolish than they already do.