Political impact of Kavanaugh sexual assault allegation

close

Video

Political impact of Kavanaugh sexual assault allegation

Sen. Grassley sets Friday deadline for Brett Kavanaugh accuser testimony; analysis from the 'Special Report' All-Stars.

This is a rush transcript from "Special Report with Bret Baier," September 19, 2018. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIPS)

SEN. MAZIE HIRONO, D-HAWAII: You know what happened right after she came forward on Sunday?

SENATE JUDICIARY COMMITTEE CHAIRMAN CHUCK GRASSLEY, R-IOWA: She was willing to come and testify, and we immediately started contacting people to make the hearing possible.

SEN. KIRSTEN GILLIBRAND, D-N.Y.: I think saying you either testify on Monday or not be heard I think is fairly outrageous.

SEN. JOHN KENNEDY, R-LA.: The confirmation process is over. I'm not being critical. I'm being factual when I say this is an 11th hour allegation.

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I really want to see her. I really would want to see what she has to say. But I want to give it all the time they need. They've already given it time. They've delayed a major hearing.

(END VIDEO CLIPS)

BRET BREAM, ANCHOR: So where are we now? Let's bring in our panel: Byron York, chief political correspondent for the Washington Examiner; Karen Tumulty, opinion writer for the Washington Post, and Tim Farley, host and managing editor of "Morning Briefing POTUS" on Sirius XM radio. Welcome to all of you.

Also this tweet from the president this morning. He says this. "The Supreme Court is one of the main reasons I got elected president. I hope Republican voters and others are watching and studying the Democrats playbook." Byron, our exit polling showed that, everybody's did, that this was one of the key issues, and it seems like he's been very measured and disciplined in this process if he's now trying to get a second appointment.

BRYON YORK, THE WASHINGTON EXAMINER: A much different President Trump than with many other issues, but I think what we saw today is we are dealing with the fallout from kind of a crazy night last night where what letters were exchanged, people went on television, and Christine Ford essentially sent out her lawyers to say she would not appear at this hearing on Wednesday unless there were an FBI investigation, which Republicans say they won't do.

So what we have seen since then is the Republicans who were wavering on this thing, Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowski, but especially Corker and Flake have both said we need to have a hearing on Monday. If she doesn't show up, then we're just going to go ahead and vote. And even Susan Collins is saying please, please, Dr. Ford, show up. So I think you've seen the Republicans who were kind of threatening to move away from the party on this begin to come back to the party on this.

BREAM: And Karen, I've heard from a lot of GOP sources saying that actually all of the heat and the persuasion and the ads and everything, the vulgar threats against Collins office, all those things have come against her and her staff has really pushed her more into the arms of the GOP. She's trying to be fair here but now starting to feel like she doesn't want to be part of the delay process unnecessarily.

KAREN TUMULTY, THE WASHINGTON POST: My understanding, though, of what Dr. Ford has said, I don't think she's definitively said she won't show up if there isn't an FBI investigation. The thing I think we all need to remember is that we still have four-and-a-half days until Monday, and the way the new cycle works in these times, this whole thing is probably going to take five or six twists and turns.

BREAM: Right, tonight.

TUMULTY: And there may be other people coming out of the woodwork either to verify what Judge Kavanaugh is saying or to back up what she is saying. By Monday this could look like a very different situation.

BREAM: As you note, we've gotten a lot of pushback from her lawyers saying they feel like she needs a full investigation. It's not fair for the committee to move forward without that. But again, not that blanket statement, there's no way she shows up on Monday.

Jonathan Turley, our audience knows him well, a well-regarded law professor across the board. He says this, "Ford's demand is, to put it simply, out of line. There's no precedent for a quid pro quo demand for testimony by a witness. Individuals can certainly refuse to testify, yet conditioning testimony on a criminal investigation by a federal agency is well beyond the province of any witness. Ford has every right to expect to be heard on these very serious allegations. She does not have the right to set conditions before testifying under oath."

TIM FARLEY, SIRIUS XM RADIO: As Karen said, she hasn't definitively said she's not going to show up, so she's making that for the opening foray, if you will, into a bargain.

We really could have an investigation. The Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill division was three days. So you could do this and it would not delay things too long. But I think that the Republicans are looking at this as an opportunity to have another Supreme Court justice and that's the goal. And Mitch McConnell has made it clear that judicial appointment are what he wants.

So in this case I think the audience is really the audience of one, the one Republican, Jeff Flake, who's been on the fence, if you will. And with him, if he is convinced that her not showing up is going to be, if that is the case, then he's going to have plenty of cover to say no. And then it gets to the full Senate, and I think at that point all Republicans would vote. It would be strictly Republican. It may be a couple of Democrats, I'm not sure. But at that point then they can get the Supreme Court justice, and the politics of the midterms be damned because you know what, we got another Supreme Court justice, look at us. Yay, yay.

BREAM: There's very much this conversation about which base is more motivated by that and the left being so upset about seeing the president get yet another and potentially others as long as Republicans control the Senate.

FARLEY: But the midterms, it's a crapshoot anyway. The House is probably going to Democrats. It may or may not, but the Senate is up in the air. And you know what, if you get a Supreme Court justice confirmed before the midterms you are not going to take a chance on losing. You will already have it done. Bird in hand.

BREAM: So this is what Anita Hill had to say about what she thinks needs to happen here.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANITA HILL, BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY LAW PROFESSOR: My advice is to push the pause button on this hearing, get the information together, bring in the experts, and put together a hearing that is fair, that is impartial, that is not biased by politics or by myth, and bring this information to the American public.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BREAM: OK, so the calls are for the FBI to get involved with this. They say that's not what we do. We prepare the file, we give it to the White House. Both the Democrats and the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee have their own staff of investigators. Both could be involved in this process. Grassley has said we will send our people to Dr. Ford wherever she wants to tell the story so she doesn't have to come here. He says the Democrats aren't cooperating with that. They have their own investigators.

YORK: They could do it themselves together or separately. The Democrats on the committee have staff investigators. They could start an investigation. And by the way, the Judiciary Committee gets special funds specifically to bulk up the staff temporarily to handle a Supreme Court nomination. There is the money to do it. They can go out there, presumably if the Democratic staff could talk to Christine Ford and the witnesses they can't talk to, Mark Judge. He's not going to talk to anybody, it appears. So they could possibly shake loose some information. And, believe me, the press would be interested in anything that they could discover.

BREAM: So we've got a couple of letters just in the last hour, literally as I'm getting ready to come out for the show. We have a very lengthy letter from the chairman to all the Democrat members and what he said in the very end is there's been delay and obstruction of this process at every turn and with every argument available. Therefore I will view any additional complaints about the process very skeptically. He outlines exactly what they've tried to get done.

He also sent this letter to the ranking member, Dianne Feinstein, and basically said to her I want to see this letter. And I think he is trying to figure out how exactly it got leaked, which seems to be a bit of a mystery how her name, Karen, ended up in the public sphere. No one's pointed the finger.

TUMULTY: Actually her name ended up in the public sphere because she came to "The Washington Post" --

BREAM: Prior to that I mean.

TUMULTY: Yes, but the incident was in the public sphere, but it was only after she, according to our reporting, really agonized over much of the summer as to whether she would actually put her name to this allegation.

And can I just say, I have dealt with stories like this, some of which I've written about, some of which I haven't written about, and that is very typical. Very often as a journalist, and I assume the same thing happens in this kind of setting, somebody will come to you and they say something happened, I would like to talk to you confidentially about it. So this is not an unusual kind of process.

BREAM: Sometimes your best stories you are never able to take public because of people's comfort level with that.

Content and Programming Copyright 2018 Fox News Network, LLC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Copyright 2018 CQ-Roll Call, Inc. All materials herein are protected by United States copyright law and may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, displayed, published or broadcast without the prior written permission of CQ-Roll Call. You may not alter or remove any trademark, copyright or other notice from copies of the content.