In her Friday speech, Collins was careful to restrict her conclusions about Ford’s allegation. Given the lack of corroboration, “the facts presented do not mean that Professor Ford was not sexually assaulted that night – or at some other time,” she said, “but they do lead me to conclude that the allegations fail to meet the ‘more-likely-than-not’ standard.” As unsatisfactory as that conclusion was to many liberals, it at least acknowledged the possibility that Ford was telling the truth.

But Collins sang a different tune on Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.” When host Dana Bash asked, “So, do you still think that it is possible that he did it; you just don’t have the proof to back that up?” Collins replied, “I do not believe that Brett Kavanaugh was her assailant. … I do believe that she was assaulted. I don’t know by whom, and I’m not certain when, but I do not believe that he was the assailant.”

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In other words, Collins, despite her professed respect for Ford, bought into the same “mistaken identity” theory that the president and Kavanaugh stalwarts pushed. The “mistaken identity” theory may be of comfort to Republicans; it squares the circle of how Ford and Kavanaugh could be both 100 percent sincere in their testimony. But science undercuts it. As Ira Hyman, a psychologist who specializes in traumatic memories, told The Post’s Avi Selk, “This story [of mistaken identity] that’s being offered here is a way of both trying to validate sexual assault and not deny it — which is a lovely change — but at the same time create a narrative that Kavanaugh couldn’t have been the person who did it. That’s just not consistent with memory research on misidentification.” As Selk notes, Collins, like all of us, has experienced at least some version of this: “It’s essentially the same phenomenon that makes people forever remember what they were doing when planes hit the World Trade Center on 9/11.”