Media

Ingraham: ‘Reasonable’ to think claim against Kavanaugh ‘is all part of a political hit job’

Fox News host Laura Ingraham says “a lot of reasonable people can conclude that” 11th-hour accusations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh are “all part of a political hit job” designed to hurt Republicans in the midterm elections. 

Last week, a woman came forward to accuse President Trump’s latest high court pick of assaulting her when they were at a high school party 35 years ago. Kavanaugh has staunchly denied the claim and says he wasn’t even at the party in question.

{mosads}Ingraham’s commentary comes as Kavanaugh and his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, are scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee next Monday.

“The fact is, there is no way to ensure Brett Kavanaugh will receive due process here because allegations such as this, they should have been examined in any of the six FBI background checks that Kavanaugh underwent,” Ingraham on her show “The Ingraham Angle” on Monday.

“But instead, this was dropped less than a week before his committee vote, and as such, a lot of reasonable people can conclude that this is all part of a political hit job, a well-orchestrated, Alinskyite maneuver trying to cause damage to Kavanaugh, President Trump and the midterm for the Republicans,” she continued. 

Ingraham was referring to the late community organizer and author Saul Alinsky, who wrote the book “Rules for Radicals” that is periodically cited by conservatives who argue his methods are dirty tactics used achieve a political goal. Alinsky’s political rules in the book include, “if you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside,” and “pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” 

Ingraham went on state that Ford’s accusation, without proper scrutiny, does a “disservice to the Senate.”

“Anyone has the freedom, male or female, has freedom to drop damaging allegations, just days before a confirmation vote, when someone has been in public service for years and years and years, undergoing six background checks,” Ingraham noted later in her opening monologue. “And then outside the normal procedures, they can drop a letter anonymously, have it leak out a few weeks later and they don’t get any criticism?”

“You can’t examine motive, you can’t examine maybe holes in the allegations, you can’t examine political affiliation. This is insanity,” she concluded. “This does a disservice to the Senate, it does a disservice to the process and it does a disservice to Brett Kavanaugh, given everything he’s given to this country in public service. And Republicans who buckle to this type of smear and type of, frankly, intimidation game, they don’t deserve to be in the Senate for another minute.”

Ingraham once was a law clerk for Clarence Thomas before he was confirmed to the Supreme Court in 1991 amid his own sexual harassment allegation from Anita Hill.