Kavanaugh's college friends say he lied under oath about drinking .
Two friends of Brett Kavanaugh's from Yale University say he was not being honest when he testified about how much he drank. Liz Swisher spoke out because "there can be no blurring between truth and falsehood." Lynne Brookes tells Lawrence she will stand by her public statements if the FBI questions her, MSNBC reported.
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Kavanaugh’s dubious account of his high school drinking
Vox reports, The key exchange came after the interviewer, Martha MacCallum, asked Kavanaugh about unsubstantiated insinuations from lawyer Michael Avenatti that Kavanaugh might have been present at parties where women were gang-raped:
That’s totally false and outrageous. I’ve never done any such thing, known about any such thing. When I was in high school — and I went to an all-boys Catholic high school, a Jesuit high school, where I was focused on academics and athletics, going to church every Sunday at Little Flower, working on my service projects, and friendship, friendship with my fellow classmates and friendship with girls from the local all-girls Catholic schools.
And yes, there were parties. And the drinking age was 18, and yes, the seniors were legal and had beer there. And yes, people might have had too many beers on occasion and people generally in high school — I think all of us have probably done things we look back on in high school and regret or cringe a bit, but that’s not what we’re talking about.
One big problem here is that Kavanaugh turned 18 in February 1983 and Maryland raised its drinking age to 21 back in July 1982. What he is perhaps misremembering is that the District of Columbia had a lower drinking age of 18 through the mid-1980s, so it was common at the time for high school seniors from the Maryland suburbs to buy beer legally in the District.
Anyone who has ever attended a party in high school or college at which alcohol was served is going to be rightly skeptical of the claim that Kavanaugh routinely attended house parties where underage drinking was banned. But his basic claim about the legal drinking age at the time is also provably false, a small fact that he probably neglected amid the larger implausibility of the overall argument.
Meanwhile, a very large volume of available evidence strongly suggests that Kavanaugh was a fairly serious partier at this point in his life.
External evidence paints a picture of a hard-partying Kavanaugh
It seems fundamentally silly to be obsessing over a Supreme Court nominee’s yearbook. But Kavanaugh’s confirmation has come to hang in the balance over sexual assault charges that are necessarily hard to prove one way or another. In that view, questions about his present-day credibility are necessarily central.
Kind of wild to think that a Supreme Court confirmation could turn on what the nominee wrote in his high school yearbook.
The references to the Keg City Club and “100 Kegs or Bust” are very clear indications that Kavanaugh was a devoted beer drinker — as is the fact that he was the biggest contributor to the Beach Week Ralph Club.
“Malibu Fan Club” also appears to be a reference to a brand of rum that’s perennially popular with younger drinkers (it’s at least conceivable that he’s just a big fan of either the Southern California town or the Chevrolet model of the same name). More ambiguously, “boofing,” the Rehoboth police (of a beach town where “ralph”-ing might have happened), and the “FFFFFFFourth of July” all seem like references to rowdy partying.
Indeed, at a slightly earlier period in his career, Kavanaugh seemed to deliberately cultivate an image of having been a hard partier in high school.
Speaking to Catholic University’s Columbus School of Law in 2015, he noted the presence of three Georgetown Prep graduates in the audience and said “Fortunately we’ve had a good saying that we’ve held firm to this day, as the dean was reminding me before the talk, which is, ‘What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep.’ That’s been a good thing for all of us, I think.”
Later, at Yale, Kavanaugh joined both the fraternity DKE and a secret society (you’ve probably heard of Skull and Bones, but Yale has a bunch of others) called Truth and Courage, both of which were known for their partying.
To be clear, it’s not particularly unusual for high school students to be involved in drunken partying, and federal data on binge drinking indicates that it was significantly more common when Kavanaugh was in school, Vox reported.
Kavanaugh’s drinking is unusually well-documented
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To be clear, it’s not particularly unusual for high school students to be involved in drunken partying, and federal data on binge drinking indicates that it was significantly more common when Kavanaugh was in school, Vox reported.
