The United States’ top investigative body reportedly won’t deliver details on “boofing,” playing the “devil’s triangle,” or whether President Donald Trump’s Supreme Court nominee ever blacked out while drinking with his elite prep school posse.The FBI wrapped up its seventh background investigation into Brett Kavanaugh Wednesday night in hopes of determining whether Kavanaugh sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford during a high school party in the summer of 1982. But the White House seriously curtailed the investigation, the Washington Post reported. As a result, the FBI avoided touching upon whether Kavanaugh lied under oath about his drinking habits, which are material to the accusations.During his Senate testimony last week, Kavanaugh repeatedly said that while he liked beer (and still likes beer to this day), he never once blacked out and certainly never assaulted Ford — or anyone else, as two other women have accused him — while under the influence. His former classmates at Yale, however, have since come out in droves to refresh his memory.“Brett was a sloppy drunk, and I know because I drank with him. I watched him drink more than a lot of people. He’d end up slurring his words, stumbling,” Liz Swisher, a chief at the University of Washington School of Medicine and one of Kavanaugh’s classmates at Yale told the Washington Post. “There’s no medical way I can say that he was blacked out …. But it’s not credible for him to say that he has had no memory lapses in the nights that he drank to excess.”If the report concluded that Kavanaugh did lie about his drinking to the Senate Judiciary Committee, that would call his credibility into question and, in turn, his assurance that he never assaulted Ford. On top of that, lying under oath is a crime.Statements that have come out since Kavanaugh’s testimony also suggest he wasn’t entirely truthful in other ways with the 21 bipartisan members of the Judiciary Committee. For example, he said that the word “boofing,” which appeared in his 1983 yearbook, referred to flatulence. But people have pointed out that a quick Google search reveals several definitions — among them ingesting alcohol or drugs through one’s rectum — but none that match Kavanaugh’s.Kavanaugh also explained away the “devil’s triangle” — also mentioned in his yearbook — as a drinking game. But his Yale classmate, James Roche, insisted to CNN that it’s a sexual act. (It commonly refers to sex between two men and one woman.)
“I was shocked when I heard that, because those words were commonly used, and they were references to sexual activities,” Roche, Kavanaugh’s freshman-year roommate, said.
The FBI, however, wasn’t interested in interviewing Kavanaugh’s former classmates, the New Yorker reported. Deborah Ramirez, who accused Kavanaugh of exposing himself to her during a drunken party at Yale, told the New Yorker, “I feel like I’m being silenced.” Several witnesses told the magazine that agents never contacted them about the alleged incident, despite attempts to reach out to the bureau themselves.
When asked on a Sunday episode of CBS’s “60 Minutes” if “the nomination is over” if Kavanaugh lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Arizona Sen. Jeff Flake, a Republican and crucial swing vote in Kavanaugh’s confirmation, said “Oh, yes.”Still, Republican senators are pushing for a confirmation vote as early as Friday.Without Flake, the FBI investigation may have never happened in the first place. Although he pushed Kavanaugh’s nomination through the Senate Judiciary Committee, he did request that the full Senate stall a confirmation vote until after the FBI carried out a week-long investigation into the sexual assault allegations against him. Other Republicans and the White House soon agreed — so long as the investigation maintained a somewhat limited scope.Cover image: Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 27, 2018. (Win McNamee/Pool Photo via AP)
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