Im wolf blitzer in the situation room. Once again weve been watching the u. S. Supreme court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, respond to the Sexual Assault allegations by professor Christine Blasey ford. The judge and the professor testifying separately today before the Senate Judiciary committee. This is truly an extraordinary daylong hearing. It started at 10 00 a. M. Eastern, what now eight hours later it continues. Theyre in a brief break right now. It will resume shortly. But there has been enormous fireworks throughout the day. It continues at least for now with no end in sight. Gloria, it looks like its going to continue and it looks like theyre going to make a major decision whether to have a vote in the committee tomorrow or not. And Phil Mattingly and lauren fox up on the hill are reporting that theres going to be a Senate Republican Conference Meeting tonight for leaders to take the temperature of the nomination and decide the next steps. So once youre done with the hearing, theyre
Judge Brett Kavanaugh and at times getting fiery, and specific at times from democrats including senator blumenthal from connecticut. Bring back our panel, britt, marie, shannon and chris. Thoughts on today on the afternoon . Things have slowed down. We had this explosion of emotion from judge kavanaugh, and very much acting like behaving like a man who has been unjustly accused and outraged by the way hes been treated by allegations of misconduct. And we had this very special moment when Lindsey Graham basically fired a lightning bolt into the Democratic Committee hearing and so they were playing partisan politics and destroying a good mans career based on very little information, and making at the political fight that it had been, or that it clearly was, and that the republicans were fighting with one armed tied behind their back with Rachel Mitchell, the prosecutor from arizona doing the questioning. Since then its been pretty quiet. I wonder what happened to Rachel Mitchell, if she
To respond to those other allegations that have come out just this week. Obviously on the republican side, they are going to be trying to boost his credibility. There will be a lot of leading questions if there even are questions, and so youll see the difference similar to how we saw earlier this morning. I wouldnt expect a lot on dr. Ford from the democratic side. It will be very interesting to see how he responds to the questions about drinking and whether his answers are shifting, as cynthia said they have started to. Whats so remarkable is that anita hill happened in 1991 and theres still no process put in place exactly. To deal with an allegation like this, to deal with a circumstance where someone being considered for a very highprofile, significant job in the federal government, theres not a process to deal with an allegation against them. Its 2018. The courts know how to deal with this both criminally and civilly. There are different standards for both, rightly so. There should
Donald trump you heard senator hirono separating children at the border. The more they make this seem this is antitrump, the more it will hurt their efforts to say kavanaugh has a serious credibility problem. They need to keep the issues separate, focus on kavanaugh or risk making it look incredibly partisan. Martha the horse is out of the barn on that. Senator hirono has said that she doesnt care what happened that night. She said what she cares about is based on his judicial decisions in the past, she thinks hes guilty. Senator koonce has said the burden is on him to prove he didnt do this. We go in with that as a backdrop. In the first confirmation hearing, Lindsey Graham pointed out that donald trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh july 9 at 9 00 p. M. By 10 18, an hour and 18 minutes later, six major democrats including top democrat in the senate, schumer, the top democrat in the house, pelosi, had already said they oppose his nomination. Theres people that was like verdict today, trial
Watched so many hearings chaired by gragssley weve seen enough o be surprised at the number of breaks the chairman has taken but you see don mcgahn, the white House Counsel going out the back door and hell go after judge kavanaugh and youll see members of the Committee Filing out. It continues to be such an interesting day of testimony. It is as if we need to be normalized by remembering that federal judges who are witnesses in this kind of thing, do not usually snap back after being asked questions by a u. S. Senator. However, offensive the questions may be. The exchange between kavanaugh and blumenthal was especially that way, john lemire is watching this. We have to suspend everything weve ever learned about congressional hearings for just what weve seen today. The number of times we said since june 2015 when donald trump announced his candidacy for president that weve never seen this before, we have lost count and another moment here. The constant interruptions and moments with sen