The statements, made by press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway in television interviews, followed reports that federal investigators are pursuing allegations made by two women but not a third, Julie Swetnick, who signed a sworn affidavit accusing Kavanaugh of sexually aggressive behavior and being present at parties where gang rapes occurred.
Trump himself tweeted late Saturday that he wanted the FBI “to interview whoever they deem appropriate, at their discretion.”
Sanders said on “Fox News Sunday” that the White House is “not micromanaging this process” but also said an open-ended probe into Swetnick’s claims and whether Kavanaugh may have misled lawmakers in his Senate Judiciary Committee testimony would not be acceptable.
“The Senate is dictating the terms. They laid out the request, and we’ve opened it up,” she said, adding, “This can’t become a fishing expedition like the Democrats would like to see it be.”
Conway said on CNN’s “State of the Union,” “It’s not meant to be a fishing expedition.” She added that who will be interviewed was “up to the FBI” in its expanded background investigation into Kavanaugh.
The only official description of parameters has come from Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa), who said Friday the FBI probe would be no more than a week long and would be limited solely to “current credible allegations” against Kavanaugh. Grassley and other senators have provided few other specifics, and a committee spokesman declined to comment after Trump’s tweet Saturday endorsing a broader approach.
Thursday’s riveting hearing, featuring testimony from California professor Christine Blasey Ford about her allegations that Kavanaugh assaulted her when both were high school students in the early 1980s, prompted several wavering Republican senators to demand a more thorough federal probe of the alleged incident.
At the hearing, Kavanaugh angrily and categorically denied assaulting Ford or any other woman. Two others, Swetnick and Debbie Ramirez, have publicly come forward to accuse Kavanaugh of other sexual misconduct.
Ramirez alleges that Kavanaugh, as a Yale University freshman, drunkenly exposed himself and shoved his penis in her face in front of a group of classmates, according to an account she gave to the New Yorker. Her attorney said Saturday that the FBI has contacted Ramirez about an interview and that she plans to cooperate.
Swetnick’s accusations, brought forward in a sworn statement by lawyer and potential 2020 presidential candidate Michael Avenatti, have been treated much more gingerly, including by Democrats, due to a lack of corroboration.
Senate Democrats have put special emphasis on having the FBI interview the people Ford says were present for the party where the alleged assault took place — particularly Mark Judge, the high school classmate of Kavanaugh’s who Ford says was in the room for the incident. Judge has said in written statements that he does not recall the incident; Senate Republicans declined to call him to testify. Two others said by Ford to have been present for the party have also said they do not recall it.
Many Democrats have called for the FBI to take a broader look at whether Kavanaugh may have misled senators by minimizing his carousing behavior in high school and college or by mischaracterizing entries in his high school yearbook that could indicate a penchant for drunken and misogynistic behavior.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), speaking on CNN, said Kavanaugh’s claims that he had never blacked out or suffered any memory loss while drinking “doesn’t quite make sense to me” and said she hoped the FBI would interview friends to determine whether that was credible.
She added that the FBI could also interview high school friends of Kavanaugh’s to determine whether his innocent explanations for portions of his yearbook entry are accurate.
“I’ve never heard that the White House, either under this president or other presidents, is saying: ‘Well, you can’t interview this person; you can’t look at this time period; you can only look at these people from one side of the street,’” she said. “I mean, come on.”
Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a member of the Judiciary Committee, said the parameters of the probe are based on the wishes of three wavering colleagues — Sens. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) — for a “limited review.”
“They wanted . . . the FBI to talk with the witnesses that Dr. Ford named,” he said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week.” “They want to talk to Ms. Ramirez, because she refused to talk to the committee. They’re going to Mark Judge — ‘Did you ever see Brett Kavanaugh drug women or engage in gang rape?’ I think that’s going to be the focus of it.”
Flake, who prompted the new FBI probe by threatening to withhold his vote to confirm Kavanaugh, said in a 60 Minutes interview set to air Sunday that he found Kavanaugh’s testimony Thursday to be “partisan” at times and that “his interaction with some of the members was a little too sharp.”
But, he said, he understood his anger. “If I was unjustly accused, that’s how I would feel, as well,” Flake said.
Both Sanders and Conway on Sunday floated a theory, circulating in conservative circles for weeks, that Ford was in fact assaulted by someone else. Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee said last week they interviewed two men who said they might have had the encounter with Ford that she described, but no Republican senator has lent any credence to those claims.
Ford testified Thursday that she was ”100 percent” certain that Kavanaugh, not another man, assaulted her in 1982. Kavanaugh, testifying hours later, said he was “100 percent” certain that he was innocent of the accusation.
“Nobody could deny that her testimony wasn’t compelling, that it wasn’t impactful,” Sanders said. “I do think the big question is, was that Brett Kavanaugh?”
Said Conway, “They both could be right — that something truly awful happened to her in the summer of 1982 by someone, somehow, somewhere, and that Judge Kavanaugh was not involved.”
Klobuchar declined to say whether she found Swetnick’s claims credible but she said she should be interviewed by federal investigators. “I believe in due process,” she said. “She did sign an affidavit, and I think it needs to be looked into, and that’s all I’ll say.”
The scope of the investigation, Klobuchar acknowledged, is up to the senators who will ultimately determine whether Kavanaugh is confirmed.
“The people who have real leverage on this thing are the three Republican senators who are still undecided,” she said. “They have to make sure that this is a credible investigation from beginning to end.”
Seung Min Kim contributed to this report.
