2020 Candidates Call For Kavanaugh Impeachment After New Misconduct Accusation

Multiple Democratic presidential contenders and former U.S. attorneys are calling for a new investigation into Brett Kavanaugh and the past FBI probe into his behavior as another accusation of sexual misconduct against the Supreme Court associate justice surfaced Saturday.

Classmate Max Stier told two New York Times reporters that he saw Kavanaugh with his pants down at a drunken Yale University party where friends pushed Kavanaugh’s penis into the hands of a female student. The report was similar to an allegation lodged against Kavanaugh last year by former classmate Deborah Ramirez. Stier informed senators and the FBI of the incident during Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, but it was never investigated, according to the Times. Since the piece was published on Saturday, the Times added an editors’ note to the article clarifying that the woman involved in the incident alleged by Stier declined an interview with the paper and “friends say that she does not recall the incident.”

At the time of Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, Christine Blasey Ford publicly accused Kavanaugh of pinning her to a bed and trying to take off her clothes at a high school party, and she testified before senators at the confirmation hearings.

Following the Times’ story, Democratic presidential contender Julián Castro called for Kavanaugh’s impeachment, tweeting Saturday: “It’s more clear than ever that Brett Kavanaugh lied under oath.” He called Kavanaugh’s ascendence a “shame to the Supreme Court.”

Rep. Sean Casten (D-Ill.) echoed Castro’s accusation that Kavanaugh lied under oath to the United States Senate, adding that the majority of senators “didn’t care.”

However, on Sunday, Sen. Kamala Harris (D-Calif.), another 2020 presidential hopeful, noted that she was one of the senators at those hearings in which “Kavanaugh lied to the U.S. Senate and most importantly to the American people.” And she also called for his impeachment.

Democratic presidential contender Elizabeth Warren, a senator from Massachusetts, also addressed the latest allegations on Sunday. “Confirmation is not exoneration, and these newest revelations are disturbing,” she tweeted, adding that Kavanaugh ― and Trump ― should be impeached.

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Yet another Democratic presidential hopeful, former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke (D-Texas), pushed for Kavanaugh to be impeached on Sunday afternoon.

Sen. Amy Klobuchar (Minn.), another Democrat running for president, was asked about Castro’s tweet Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “My concern here is that the process was a sham,” she said of Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, noting she was on the Judiciary Committee and opposed his nomination. She did not call for his impeachment.

Like Klobuchar, Democratic presidential candidate and former Vice President Joe Biden did not explicitly call for Kavanaugh’s impeachment. But the former vice president said in a statement that the Times report raises “profoundly troubling questions about the integrity of the confirmation process that put Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court in the first place.”

Biden called for further investigation into whether the Trump administration and Senate Republicans pressured the FBI to ignore evidence or witnesses in their background investigation of Kavanaugh, according to a statement obtained by Axios.

Former U.S. attorney Joyce Vance called Saturday for a “full congressional investigation” into Kavanaugh’s behavior and a probe into his past to “determine whether someone, and if so who, gave orders that kept the FBI from investigating credible allegations.”

Another former U.S. attorney, Harry Litman, called the FBI investigation into Kavanaugh a “total con job.”

This article has been updated with more information about the Times article and comments from Biden, Harris, Klobuchar, O’Rourke and Warren.

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