Fake news, the former president called it.
“NBC News incorrectly reported (as usual) that I was limiting the FBI investigation of Judge Kavanaugh, and witnesses, only to certain people,” Donald Trump posted on Twitter, now called X, in Sept. 2018. “Actually, I want them to interview whoever they deem appropriate, at their discretion. Please correct your reporting!”
NBC News would in fact go on to report a few days later that Trump’s online directive had no impact in real life. In a report immediately following Trump’s corrective, the outlet noted that the FBI had received “no new instructions from the White House” and that the former president's claims aside, there were indeed limits imposed on the bureau’s investigation by the Trump White House, which, for example, prohibited an interview with a woman accusing the future Supreme Court justice of sexual misconduct, as well as Kavanaugh’s high school classmates.
Trump’s comments came after Christine Blasey Ford publicly accused Kavanaugh of assaulting her at a high school party decades earlier. Following that charge, the bureau told Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., that it had received more than 4,500 tips regarding the conservative justice as part of the bureau’s “limited inquiry,” which ended on Oct. 4, 2018. Tips that were “relevant,” it said, were forwarded to the White House.
What the FBI did not say is that it failed to investigate a single one of those tips, according to a report from the Rhode Island Democrat that was first shared Tuesday with The Washington Post. According to the Post’s summary of the report, Trump’s claim that there would be a broader investigation with no limits imposed by the White House “came as a surprise to the FBI,” which continued to limit the scope of its inquiry in accordance with dictates from the White House counsel’s office.
Of the 4,500 tips that the FBI received, “None were investigated or even screened for indicia of credibility,” according to the report. In fact, a day before Trump denied “limiting the investigation,” his counsel instructed the FBI to forward those tips to the White House “without further investigation, no matter how reliable or corroborative the tips seemed,” the report states. The Trump administration also “declined to authorize the FBI to interview witnesses and pursue tips that might have uncovered the corroborating information some senators later claimed was lacking.”
Kavanaugh was confirmed by a 50-48 vote on Oct. 6, 2018.
In a statement, Whitehouse accused the FBI of conducting an inquiry so lacking that it was “unworthy” of the Senate. Contra claims that the inquiry was “by the book,” he said that there was no book upon which to rely: every step of the investigation was dictated by the Trump White House.
“This report shows that the supplemental background investigation was a sham, controlled by the Trump White House, to give political cover to Senate Republicans and put Justice Kavanaugh back on the political track to confirmation,” Whitehouse said. “The lack of FBI investigative standards helped the Trump White House thwart meaningful investigation of the allegations against Kavanaugh, denying senators information needed to fulfill their constitutional duties.”
The FBI declined to comment on the report itself, but a spokesperson told Salon that the bureau followed the same process for its Kavanaugh inquiry as it does for other so-called supplemental background investigations.
"In these investigations, the FBI follows a long-standing, established process through which the scope of the investigation is limited to what is requested," the spokesperson said.
But Deirdre Schifeling, chief political and advocacy officer at the ACLU, told Salon that the report raises serious questions about the independence of the FBI under the Trump administration.
"A hallmark of authoritarian governments is the abuse of government power to protect friends and punish opponents," she said.
Lawyers for Blasey Ford, meanwhile, said in a statement that they were disappointed but not surprised by the report’s findings.
“The congressional report published today confirms what we long suspected: the FBI supplemental investigation of then-nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh was, in fact, a sham effort directed by the Trump White House to silence brave victims and other witnesses who came forward and to hide the truth,” attorneys Debra Katz and Lisa Banks said.
