Sheldon Whitehouse says FBI caved to Trump pressure in Kavanaugh confirmation probe

The 2018 Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Brett Kavanaugh were marked not just for their partisan rancor, but also for the unprecedented digging into the now-justice's background by the FBI.

Senate Judiciary Committee member Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) recently stepped forward to allege that the agency failed to fully probe claims of misconduct on the part of Kavanaugh, a shutdown in activity that he attributed to undue pressure from the Trump administration, as USA Today reports, but not everyone agrees.

Whitehouse issues new report

In a report issued last week, Whitehouse claims that despite then-President Donald Trump's pledge to give the FBI full freedom to investigate claims leveled against then-Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh, the results of the probe were “flawed and incomplete.”

According to Whitehouse, the agency failed to conduct thorough follow-up on a number of investigative leads about sexual misconduct of which Kavanaugh stood accused.

Whitehouse lamented in his report that despite public declarations of agency freedom to explore all avenues, “the Trump White House exercised total control over the scope of the investigation, preventing the FBI from interviewing relevant witnesses and following up on tips.”

The result, the senator claims, was that the FBI was “kneecap(ped),” and the administration essentially “misled the Senate.”

Whitehouse's allegations were met with a swift rebuke from Trump campaign spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt, who dismissed the report as little more than an attempt to “delegitimize the Supreme court and pave the way for Kamala Harris to pack the Court with Radical-Left Judges.”

Davis weighs in

Leavitt is not the only one to raise doubts about the validity or sincerity of Whitehouse's findings, with Mike Davis, who worked as chief counsel on Supreme Court nominations for the GOP at the time, also entering the fray, as Fox News notes.

Now serving as founder and president of the Article III Project, Davis declared, “We followed the normal procedures for a Supreme Court nominee to do his background investigation,” noting that the Senate conducts investigations of its own in addition to the Judiciary panel's probe.

Taking issue with many of the assertions made by Whitehouse in his report, Davis stated, “It's just a silly premise that these senators think that the FBI was going to solve crimes in this particular nomination. That's not their role here.”

He continued, “The Senate is not supposed to just rely on the FBI. The FBI does not work for the Senate. The FBI works for the president.”

Davis declared that the report is “a pathetic attempt by Sheldon Whitehouse to try to intimidate and cowl the Supreme Court justices before they may have to decide on crucial election cases, with the election coming up,” also quipping that perhaps the senator simply “had one too many Mai Tais at his all-White beach club when he concocted this latest conspiracy theory.”