Last night, the legal team representing Christine Ford, she’s the California woman who claims Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh groped her at some place at some time in the past, sent yet another letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee whinging about most everything. Colleague Miranda Morales covered it in this post but, parsing it, it seems more like someone laying the groundwork for a refusal to show up rather than anything else.

Check out the points.

This Bromwich character snivels about Senator Mitch McConnell’s righteous floor speech yesterday. One would hope that Bromwich is bright enough to realize that Chuck Grassley doesn’t tell McConnell, or any other senator, what they may or may not say. So it seems he is setting the predicate to claim that Grassley reneged on his guarantee to allow Ford to spin her yarn without laughing (let me say it again, there is zero evidence that anything this woman has claimed, beyond her name, is the truth). He is objecting to how Grassley wishes to conduct the investigation. This is not something that is any of his concern. He was informed in an earlier letter that the Committee reserved the right to use outside counsel to question Ford. One would think Bromwich would be chomping at the bit to have an experienced sex crimes investigator ask the questions. Who, after all, would know more about how to not further traumatize an actual victim and how to elicit maximum facts from them? The fact that Bromwich craps himself over this issue is a clue as to his fears. Someone who has dealt with actual victims is going to make Ford look really bad. The clear objective here is to generate video of old, white male Republican senators asking Ford some very tough questions about which she will have no answers but the sad trombone (can we say “womp, womp”?) will play as he gets pouty faced and tears up. If that doesn’t happen, the hearing is meaningless. There is zero reason that the Senate Judiciary Committee would have to provide Bromwich with any information on whom the Committee has selected to do the examination. Their qualifications have nothing to do with anything. The Committee could have anyone it pleased ask the questions. But we know why they want the name. They want to send a rent-a-mob to the person’s home and they want to try to preemptively discredit them by the cases they’ve prosecuted.

All of this seems like Ford is looking for a reason not to show up on Thursday morning. And with good reason. Thus far, of the five people Ford alleges were in the house when she was groped, four of them deny being at any such event and Ford’s lifelong friend says she’s never met Brett Kavanaugh. If she presses ahead with this bullsh** it is hard to see how she doesn’t make herself vulnerable to charges of lying to Congress.