abc NEWS - President Donald Trump says he wants to hear from the accuser of his Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh but said it's hard for him to believe that the allegation brought by professor Christine Blasey Ford is true.
If she shows up and makes a credible showing, that will be very interesting and we'll have to make a decision," President Trump said. "But I can only say this, he is such an outstanding man. Very hard for me to imagine that anything happened."
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The president again brushed off the idea of asking the FBI to reopen its background check into Kavanaugh, something he has the power to order, saying "it would seem the FBI doesn't do that" and deferring to senators to handle the process from this point forward.
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The president said the Senate has already given a lot of extra time to the process due to the late-breaking allegation and questioned the motives of Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, for not bringing forward a letter detailing the allegation, which she has had for months, sooner.
"Why didn't Senator Feinstein bring this up at her meeting with judge Kavanaugh?" he said. "Why did they wait until everything was finished and then bring it up? That doesn't look good."
The president expressed sympathy for his Supreme Court pick, saying "it's a very unfair thing what's going on" and calling Kavanaugh "an extraordinary man."
"This is a very tough thing for him and his family and we want to get it over with but at the same time we want to give tremendous amounts of time. If she shows up, that would be wonderful. If she doesn't show up, that would be unfortunate," he said.
Speaking for myself I must say tRump has his mind made up. Regardless what Ford might have to say. One only needs to recall tRump's history of sexual predation to grasp why that would be.
Colleagues of Christine Blasey Ford are coming forward to support Ford and talk about her integrity and honesty.
Los Angeles Times - Christine Blasey Ford, the Northern California psychology professor who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault when they were both teenagers, is described by colleagues as a rigorous statistician who doesn’t fudge the data or stray from the facts.
One psychiatrist who has collaborated with her on four academic papers told The Times that Ford is “a woman of great integrity”; another who has known her for more than 10 years described her as calm, measured and scrupulously honest.
Those assessments are certain to be challenged if Ford agrees to testify before the Republican-dominated Senate Judiciary Committee about the night, more than three decades ago, when she says a stumbling-drunk Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed, groped her, ground his body against hers and covered her mouth when she tried to scream.
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Stanford psychiatry professor David Spiegel has known Ford for 14 years and co-wrote academic papers with her on subjects including people who suffered trauma from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the effects of hypnosis on depression.
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“I know her to be an honorable, honest, straightforward, decent person. I can’t conceive of her doing this for any other reason than she is honestly reporting what she’s experienced,” Spiegel said of Ford, a Palo Alto University professor who teaches in a consortium at Stanford.
Spiegel, who said he was speaking personally and not on behalf of Stanford, added that Ford is a “solid biostatistician and a woman of great integrity.”
C. Barr Taylor, a retired Stanford psychiatry professor, said he has known Ford for more than a decade and that she worked with his students to improve the statistical analysis in their dissertations.
Taylor said Ford’s personality — calm, measured and kind — suits the work she does.
For certain there are questions to be answered. Many are questioning the timing of Ford's allegations, and, she has ackowleged she can't remember some key events of the occurance. Those are concerns that should easily be worked through in a fashion that results in a proper decision on the nominees fate. After all the integrity of the Senate will be on trial in the court of public opinion.
