Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island is one of the most prominent conspiracy theorists in Congress. Three years later, he still hasn’t given up his evidence-free crusade against Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
Whitehouse used his time during the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearing on the FBI’s handling of the investigation into Larry Nassar to focus on Kavanaugh. Yes, not even the FBI’s botched handling of allegations against Nassar, the former USA gymnastics physician and convicted predator, could keep the Democrat from his inane, partisan theories against a Republican nominee.
Whitehouse used his time to question FBI director Christopher Wray not about the FBI’s mishandling of the allegations against Nassar but to compare the FBI’s handling of those allegations to those of Christine Blasey Ford against Kavanaugh.
Again, it cannot be emphasized enough: There is no evidence Kavanaugh and Blasey Ford even met each other. Blasey Ford accused Kavanaugh of rape but could not identify the place or time this allegedly happened. She couldn’t even narrow down what year she claimed it happened until the third version of her story. Her lifelong friend Leland Keyser, along with everyone else Ford claimed was at the party, said no such party happened.
Whitehouse makes a fool of himself in many committee hearings, including his insistence that “boofing” was some nefarious term when he questioned Kavanaugh. Even CNN, citing a Democratic Senate staffer, debunked his claim that senators were not given access to all of the tips called into the FBI’s tipline during Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings in 2018.
Whitehouse is doing this to delegitimize Kavanaugh and the ostensible conservative majority of the Supreme Court, and he has admitted to trying to intimate justices into ruling the way he wants. If Republicans ignored the Nassar scandal to question the FBI about anything else, much less a partisan conspiracy theory, they would get slammed for it. But Whitehouse knows he can get away with it, and he’s willing to do it with no shame.
It isn’t hard to believe the FBI could botch something as big as the Nassar scandal when politicians such as Whitehouse demand it chase every conspiracy theory he thinks can help his party politically.
