Report: Trump Constrained FBI's Kavanaugh Probe

A new report alleges that in September 2018, then-President Donald Trump did not fully authorize the FBI to investigate allegations of sexual misconduct that threatened the confirmation of his Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, even though he had vowed that the agency would have "free rein."

The report, produced by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, is based on previously undisclosed communications between the FBI and the White House, reported The Washington Post, which obtained the information before it was to be publicly released Tuesday.

"It all went up to the White House for a decent burial with no investigation whatsoever," Whitehouse said.

Trump had ordered the additional inquiry following testimony by Christine Blasey Ford, who said Kavanaugh had tried to remove her clothes and that he groped her more than 30 years earlier during a high school party in Maryland.

A second accuser, Deborah Ramirez, told The New Yorker that Kavanaugh had acted inappropriately at a dorm party at Yale University in the early 1980s.

Back in 2018, Trump said the FBI was "talking to everybody," and posted on social media that he wanted the agency "to interview whoever they deem appropriate, at their discretion."

According to Whitehouse's report, FBI officials, who had been directed to conduct an inquiry in one week, had requested "additional guidance" from the White House.

However, they never got the authorization to probe two women's claims of sexual misconduct, which Kavanaugh, now a justice, strongly denied, the report said.

Further, the documentation revealed that messages that were to go to the FBI's tip line about Kavanaugh had been directly forwarded to the Trump White House and were not investigated, and that the FBI did not have written protocols for the supplemental background investigation that had been ordered.

Rather than a dedicated tip line being set up for the Kavanaugh inquiry, a preexisting line, for the National Threat Operations Center, was used.

Through it, the FBI got more than 4,500 calls and messages about Kavanaugh, and was directed to send the tips to the White House without following the leads, the report said.

Blasey Ford’s lawyers, Debra Katz and Lisa Banks, said the report confirmed their suspicions that the FBI's supplemental investigation was a "sham effort directed by the Trump White House to silence brave victims and other witnesses who came forward and to hide the truth."

John Clune, an attorney for Ramirez, said the report was "disappointing" since she was "so candid about something that was a pretty awful experience."

Kavanaugh did not respond to the Post's request for a comment, but Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said that the justice was "unfairly slandered and smeared with lies."

Some of the White House's limits on the probe were widely reported at the time.

The FBI did not question Blasey Ford about her allegations, or Kavanaugh, and did not interview dozens of people the women's lawyers provided to offer corroborating evidence.

The agency also would not comment directly on the report.

It said in a statement that when responding to White House requests for background investigations, it is limited to what has been requested.

"The FBI does not have the independent authority to expand the scope of a supplemental background investigation outside the requesting agency’s parameters," the agency said.

Whitehouse said the committee's review of the FBI's investigation took six years after the Trump administration and President Joe Biden's White House resisted requests for correspondence with the FBI, answering questions, and allowing access to FBI officials.

According to senators investigating the FBI's probe, before 2021, the only information they could get concerning the procedures used for a supplemental investigation was a YouTube video, made publicly accessible to show how the FBI's tip line was to work.

Further, senators also contacted the agency directly with the names of people who said they had information, but the FBI did not contact those people, according to the report.