Kavanaugh's former classmates just came forward to expose his Senate testimony lies
By Vinnie Longobardo
After Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh ranted and raved during his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, and tearfully denied the accusations by multiple women that he drunkenly assaulted them in his high school and college years, former classmates of the embattled nominee told The New York Times that his portrayal of himself as someone not even resembling the person who was accused of being an aggressive, heavy drinker who was subject to blackouts rang patently false in their experience.
Lynne Brookes was a classmate of Kavanaugh's at Yale and the roommate of Deborah Ramirez, the woman who accused him of thrusting his penis in her face at a drunken dorm-room party.
As a Republican with a similar background to the nominee's, it is difficult to claim that she has a political agenda in refuting Kavanaugh's denials of bad behavior, yet she told the newspaper that he had "grossly misrepresented and mischaracterized his drinking."
"He frequently drank to excess," she said. "I know because I frequently drank to excess with him."
She would not accept Kavanaugh's intimation that he could not have been an excessive drunk because he was too involved with his studies and athletic pursuits to be partying constantly.
"It is completely possible to do both," she told The New York Times.
Other Yale classmates agreed:
"I drank a lot. Brett drank more," said Elizabeth Swisher, a Seattle physician who also was at Yale with Kavanaugh.
Daniel Lavan shared a dorm with the nominee during freshman year at the Ivy League university. He responded to Kavanaugh's testimony with a completely different recollection of the facts.
"I definitely saw him on multiple occasions stumbling drunk where he could not have rational control over his actions or clear recollection of them," he said. "His depiction of himself is inaccurate."
Interviews with multiple classmates from his elite high school Georgetown Prep have revealed a portrait of the young Kavanaugh as a frequent heavy drinker. Also, while at Yale, he was a member of the notoriously bacchanalian fraternity Delta Kappa Epsilon.
In a speech to Yale Law students in 2014 that Kavanaugh may now regret, he reminisced about an evening of "group chugs" during a trip to Boston that resulted in he and his friends "falling out of the bus onto the front steps of Yale Law School at about 4:45 a.m.," not exactly consistent with the image he tried to sell at his hearing.
It's not just Kavanaugh's characterization of his drinking that rings false with former classmates. His claims about the innocence of several entries in his high school yearbook don't pass the smell test for some of them as well.
Sean Hagen is one of four separate former Georgetown Prep students who have disputed the notion that the misspelled phrase "Renate Alumnius" in Kavanaugh's Yearbook entry was an innocent reference to his dating history.
"After his testimony ended, Mr. Hagan wrote on Facebook: 'So angry. So disgusted. So sad. Integrity? Character? Honesty?,'" The New York Times reported.
William Fishburne, the manager of the school football team in Judge Kavanaugh's senior year at Georgetown Prep, disputed the nominee's innocent explanation of another term in his yearbook entry, saying that "The explanation of Devil's Triangle does not hold water for me." Bill Barbot, another alumni at the school also felt that the judge was less than honest in his retroactive interpretation of the inside jokes in the yearbook.
"The spin that Brett was putting on it was a complete overstatement of the innocence with which they were intended," he said.
While it may be quite understandable that Kavanaugh is reluctant to air his disastrous youthful mistakes in public, it is still unforgivable for a nominee to the nation's highest court to lie outright about the details of his character in front of a Congressional committee considering his confirmation.
Any indications of a lack of integrity—the kind of indications that his school classmates have so righteously provided—should be automatic grounds for his rejection.
It isn't like he's the only qualified nominee for the job. He's just the only one who has telegraphed his position on the possibility of indicting a sitting president and that's why Trump and the Republican leadership are fighting so hard to save his chances of confirmation. We can't let them win.
Follow Vinnie Longobardo on Twitter.
Original reporting by Mike McIntire, Linda Qiu, Steve Eder and Kate Kelly in The New York Times.
Vinnie Longobardo
Vinnie Longobardo is a 35-year veteran of the TV, mobile, & internet industries, specializing in start-ups and the international media business. His passions are politics, music, and art.