Avenatti's new Kavanaugh witness: Not the best poker player

Poker is a game of half-truths and flat-out lies, with the occasional pinch of truth tossed in for flavor. Leftists, bad players that they are, are once again betting into a pot they have no chance in Hell of winning, provided at least one other player in the game has the savvy to call them on their obvious and clumsy attempts to buy. After two incredibly poor attempts to assassinate the character of a man with impeccable credentials, our favorite porn-star counsel, Michael Avenatti, has decided to 3-bet the pot by rolling out yet another eleventh-hour witness, one Julie Swetnick. She claims to have credible, firsthand knowledge of Brett Kavanaugh's heinous frat boy shenanigans, even suggesting (obliquely) that he had an active hand in criminal behavior, such as spiking punch with illegal drugs and alcohol and (maybe) taking a next-in-line ticket for the frequent gang rapes we're told took place at all these parties he supposedly went to with shocking regularity.

On its face, this latest "revelation" is no real surprise. To use another poker analogy, this is what we would call a "continuation bet." Once you lead the betting into a pot, to suddenly stop betting future rounds is quite often a dead giveaway to everyone else that you had nothing to begin with, and it invites your opponent to come and take the pot away from you. Mr. Avenatti is trying to represent a royal flush – that is, the highest hand in poker, the one that no one else can defeat. If he sells it to the rest of the table, he gets the prize: the complete and irreversible derailment of Kavanaugh's nomination to the SCOTUS. This latest revelation is Avenatti's "over the top" bet into the pot, one last chance to steal it. If this were a card game, any good player would determine his next move by first examining the cards already exposed for all to see. In this case, we have the signed declaration of Ms. Swetnick, which can be viewed here. Even a mediocre player would quickly home in on paragraphs 11, 12, and 13 of this document. Beginning with paragraph 11, let's see if we can sniff out the bluff: When considering the phrasing here, several observations surface. Ms. Swetnick states she "became aware of efforts" by Judge and Kavanaugh (to be safe, she mentions unnamed "others") to "spike the punch" with drugs and booze. The first half of this paragraph is little more than a long-winded way of saying, "I heard someone say...," which is proof of nothing, not even that it really happened. Then she witnessed further "efforts" to "target" unaccompanied girls crippled by extreme shyness, while neither naming these girls (or, indeed, anyone else in attendance) nor specifically defining the methods employed by these two evildoers to "spike and target." Nor does she say anyone was definitively taken advantage of – only that "efforts" were made to do so. What did these efforts entail? What were the actual actions? In the second half of this paragraph, while somewhat weakly saying, "I personally saw efforts," she provides no specifics on how things were done – only that undefined efforts were made. It's not made clear at any point whether any of these "efforts" even met with success. "I also witnessed..." Does Ms. Swetnick mean to suggest that another method, something other than "spike and target," was employed here? What did they do to "cause girls to become inebriated"? Did Judge hold a girl down, while Kavanaugh shoved a funnel in her mouth, to pour beer or wine or Quaaludes down her throat? Did Kavanaugh offer a girl a shot of vodka while Judge smacked her repeatedly with a rolled up newspaper until she downed the offered beverage? Was it the other way around? Did any of those aforementioned "others" in attendance cause anyone to become inebriated? If so, how? She suggests that gang-rapes took place, again, without concretely saying they did. Were police reports filed in the aftermath of these "many" parties? Were arrests ever made? What are the names of all these serial rapists who attended these "many" parties, lined up and awaiting their turn to rape a drugged girl? Ms. Swetnick has a "firm recollection" of boys lined up (again, at "many" parties) but can't name any of them? That's strange, because you'd think that while she was making efforts to avoid the spiked punchbowls, as stated in paragraph 11, she'd also be making efforts to attend only parties where the other attendees (at least a majority of them) would be people known to her, and absent those evil people who cause girls they've targeted to become inebriated and then rape them. This next one is the bluffer's "tell," the thing that immediately makes you push your entire stack of chips into the pot to call, because you now know beyond any doubt that you're being taken for a fool: Really? We're expected to overlook the obvious problem with this last statement? She becomes a victim of the criminal behavior she has already stated she had witnessed at previous parties? After seeing girls being drugged and raped at "many" prior parties, she goes to yet another one? One where two evil men (and "others" – let's not forget them) who drug and rape girls regularly are known to be in attendance? And while these two heinous individuals are apparently close by, she becomes so relaxed, so un-mindful of her own personal security, so forgetful of what she's previously seen done to other drugged and gang-raped girls, that she winds up sticking around to become one of them? While stating that "boys" were raping her, she still does not specifically name Judge or Kavanaugh as two of them – just that they were "present." Nor does she name anyone else in attendance (again), not even the "at least two people" she told the details of her tragic rape to. Poker players, among other things, can apply statistical probability to certain outcomes, like the odds of getting that king they need to make their straight. With this much bad behavior being attributed to Kavanaugh, the odds of finding that he's at least been through a police lineup, if for no other reason than to eliminate him as a suspect, should be getting quite high at this point. Yet nothing that substantiates any of these claims against Kavanaugh has appeared so far. When this document is closely examined, not a single credible fact surfaces from it about the history of Brett Kavanaugh or Mark Judge, although Ms. Swetnick spends a significant amount of space within it cataloguing her own credentials. Why? She supplies a cornucopia of security clearances and job history to support a paper-thin accusation of drugging and gang-rape from 1981-82? I can't speak for anyone else, but I thought having the Microsoft MCSE credential (and one of the first 100 women to get it!) really did lend weight to her gang-rape allegations. Does she have any Cisco credentials? That would really blow this whole Kavanaugh thing wide open. For someone with no stated college background or degree, she claims quite a litany of alphabet agency jobs. Someone more experienced with government service should sort out the truth of her background, because it's clear that's what the leftists are pinning their hopes of this document passing muster on: her broad and lengthy list of swamp jobs and security clearances, to give her credibility. If Stormy Daniels had a clearance, Avenatti would likely still be playing that hand. Oh, well. Not everyone can be a good poker player. If I had a few more like this at a table, I'd never have to work again. Gabe Williams is an avid reader of AT and occasionally posts comments under the name Magishan – that is, when Disqus isn't auto-deleting them for some unknown reason.