Kavanaugh Can Join Thomas.

[Angrboda]

The prosecutor hired by Republican senators to question Christine Blasey Ford has declared that Ford’s allegations of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh are so weak that no “reasonable prosecutor” would pursue the case.

“A ‘he said, she said’ case is incredibly difficult to prove. But this case is even weaker than that,” Rachel Mitchell, a Repub­lican sex-crimes prosecutor from Arizona, wrote Sunday in a five-page memorandum, highlighting what she described as inconsistencies in Ford’s account and a lack of corroboration from potential witnesses.

Though Senate Republicans said the memo was helpful, legal experts from both political parties and advocates for victims of sexual assault on Monday questioned how Mitchell could reach such a conclusion without a fuller investigation and without the ability to cross-examine witnesses such as Mark Judge, the only other person Ford says was in the room when the alleged incident occurred in the summer of 1982.

“As a former prosecutor myself, I’ve come to no conclusion other than the conclusion that there needs to be more facts to come to a conclusion,” said Douglas Wigdor, an employment lawyer who has represented plaintiffs in sexual assault and harassment cases. Wigdor, a Republican, called the memo “a joke” and “preposterous.”

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Matthew Long, a defense attorney who once worked for Mitchell as a sex-crimes prosecutor, was quoted as calling her “the best” in a story in a local newspaper last week, before the memo was issued. On Monday, Long said he was surprised to see that she cited Ford’s gaps in memory as evidence of the weakness of her allegation.

“The things that she’s highlighting that say that Dr. Ford is not credible are the very things she has taught me to ignore and not rely on,” he said in an interview. The memo, he said, “demonstrates she’s abandoned what she knows to be true in favor of being a political operative.”

(Washington Post)