Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris got the details of the newest sexual-assault allegation against Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh wrong in a letter she sent Tuesday to the House Judiciary Committee calling for the allegation to be investigated.
Harris’s letter called for a House task force to undertake an impeachment investigation against Kavanaugh in response to a New York Times story that was published over the weekend and which detailed a previously unreported claim of sexual assault against the judge.
In her letter, Harris conflates the newly revealed incident with a separate sexual-assault allegation lodged against Kavanaugh by former Yale classmate Deborah Ramirez.
“It was also reported that one of Ms. Ramirez’s former classmates alleged that he saw Mr. Kavanaugh with his pants down at a dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into Ms. Ramirez’s hand,” the letter states.
The Times article, which draws on an upcoming investigative book by two of the paper’s reporters, claims that Kavanaugh’s friends “pushed” his penis into the hand of an unwitting female classmate during a drunken dorm party at Yale. The initial article did not reveal that the alleged victim does not recall the event; that detail was later added in an editor’s note.
Kavanaugh’s former Yale classmate Max Stier, a Washington, D.C. attorney with connections to prominent Democrats, reported the latest allegation to the FBI during the fight over Kavanaugh’s confirmation and made clear that his tip did not refer to the allegation made by Ramirez, who claims that Kavanaugh brandished his penis near her face during a drunken dorm party their freshman year.
Stier claims to have witnessed Kavanaugh “with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student,” (emphasis added) according to the Times article.
Several other Democratic presidential candidates and members of Congress have called for Kavanaugh’s impeachment after the story on the new allegations against him broke.