deal with a, quote, large down payment on a wall. also tonight, president trump s former lawyer, michael cohen, has been subpoenaed by the senate intelligence committee a day after he postponed testimony before a house panel, citing threats to his family from president trump and his current lawyer, rudy giuliani. house committee chairmen say they may also order cohen to appear. i ll speak to ted liu of the joushry committee. and our correspondents are standing by with full coverage. let s begin with efforts to end the government shutdown. two competing bills were both voted down in the senate but there are now some urgent bip t bipartisan efforts to try to forge a compromise. will the white house go along? let s go to white house correspondent kaitlan collins, she s standing by. first, phil mattingly is up on capitol hill. what s the very latest, phil? reporter: the failure of
but now senator grassley insists that it can t happen here. it can t happen here with this allegation against brett kavanaugh. senator grassley today. quote, committee investigators are following up on the leads from dr. ford s allegations and news stories. no other outside, all caps, outside investigation is necessary for the committee to do its investigation. yeah, but why not have the fbi look into it, since that is what they do for supreme court nominees and all other nominees for which they do background checks? why are you trying so hard to stop the fbi from looking into this which would again be the normal process here? what s the problem of them looking into it? this is also perhaps a good point to remember that when senator grassley talks about how he only wants his staff to look into these things instead of anybody outside, instead of the fbi there s no need for anybody else other than his staff to look into this. one of chairman grassley s staff members who works with him
lasey-ford was to call in outside counsel to look into the investigation if, there s corroboration for it and as a factual matter senators might look into assessing the credibility of this allegation and the denial from judge kavanaugh. senator feinstein elected not to go that route, not to pursue that. given how things are going, i wonder if you and other democrats on the committee are thinking about potentially trying to engage some sort of independent investigator to look into this matter. that is still going to require the consent of the rules committee, republican chair and chuck grassley. so, that s a nonstarter. the fbi is supposed to be doing this investigation and for chuck grassley to say there s nothing that the fbi can do that will have any relevance to dr. ford s testimony defies all logic, in my view. by the way, we all know that she is being threatened. isn t that witness tampering? isn t that a crime? why does the fbi have to wait
this committee, on judicial nominations specifically is named barbara ledine. if that name is familiar to you in the context of brett kavanaugh s nomination, you might remember from his confirmation hearings that controversy over whether or not brett kavanaugh ever received documents when he worked in the bush white house that had been sto stolen from senate democrats. you might remember in that controversy there was a sort of smoking gun piece of evidence produced during the confirmation hearings, which showed that brett kavanaugh had, in fact, received documents stolen from democrats while he worked in the bush white house and he had to have known they were stolen, despite his assertions to the contrary under oath, in part because of what we could see in the document, which was sent to him and which brett kavanaugh forwarded from his white house e-mail account in 2003. this is the document where the subject line was literally, quote, spying. and the first line was, quote, i have a fr
douglas ginsburg had smoked pot. she s the one who blew up the douglas ginsburg nomination. she was also the one four years later who reported that professor anita hill made very serious detailed allegations against judge clarence thomas and whether or not most senators even knew about those allegations, the committee had that information and the fbi had even questioned people about those allegations at the white house s request. so the white house knew about it, too. when nina totenberg broke the story, that s when the story truly broke for the country. that s when anita hill s allegations came to light in the press. before the week was up, the committee decided okay, i guess we better reopen the confirmation process for clarence thomas and take public sworn testimony from both anita hill and clarence thomas. and that hearing, of course, is still seen today as one of the worst examples of how not to treat a person who is coming forward with serious sexual harassment allegations.