Senator Susan Collins of Maine said Monday on Twitter that both Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey Ford, the California professor who has accused him of assaulting her as a teen, should testify under oath before the Senate Judiciary Committee regarding the claim.
Professor Ford and Judge Kavanaugh should both testify under oath before the Judiciary Committee.
— Sen. Susan Collins (@SenatorCollins) September 17, 2018
Collins had previously questioned why her Democratic colleagues waited two months before revealing the accusation after the accuser came forward in a letter forwarded to Senator Dianne Feinstein of California, the ranking Judiciary Committee Democrat, in July.
“What is puzzling to me is the Democrats, by not bringing this out earlier, after having had this information for more than six weeks, have managed to cast a cloud of doubt on both the professor and the judge,” Collins told the New York Times Sunday. “If they believe Professor Ford, why didn’t they surface this information earlier so that [Kavanaugh] could be questioned about it? And if they didn’t believe her and chose to withhold the information, why did they decide at the 11th hour to release it? It is really not fair to either of them the way it was handled.”
Ford, a psychology professor at Palo Alto University, sent the letter through her congressional representative, Democrat Anna Eshoo, to Feinstein in July but asked that she not be identified. She later identified herself as the letter’s author on Sunday after Feinstein described the claim made in the letter late last week.
Many have speculated that Collins, a moderate, pro-choice Republican, might be willing to cooperate with Democrats in their effort to delay Kavanaugh’s confirmation. The Maine lawmaker told CNN Monday that she considered the allegation to be serious, adding that Kavanaugh was “very emphatic in his denial” when she spoke to him on Friday.