Did Coons’ Question Prompt Kavanaugh to Lie Under Oath?

Here’s a nugget from last week’s questioning of Brett Kavanaugh that I overlooked until I read William Saletan’s article asserting that, far from a “fishing expedition,” questions about Kavanaugh’s drinking cry out for investigation.

Saletan uses this to buttress one of his points, but it’s worth emphasizing here:

In the hearing, Sen. Chris Coons asked Kavanaugh “whether you’ve ever gotten aggressive while drinking.” Kavanaugh replied, “I think the answer to that is basically no.” He pressed Coons for details—“What are you talking about?”—and went on: “ ‘No’ is the basic answer, unless you’re talking about something where—that I’m not aware of, that you’re going to ask about.”

He could have said yes. He could have said that he had once thrown ice or beer at a guy or that he had once tried to break into a pickup truck. Instead he said no, and he fished for clues.

What was going on in that exchange? There are three possibilities. One is that all the evidence of Kavanaugh’s aggressive behavior—the police report, Ludington’s eyewitness account, and the story told by classmates about the pickup truck—is bogus. The second possibility is that Kavanaugh remembered these incidents but chose to pretend they had never happened. The third possibility is that he didn’t acknowledge them because he didn’t remember them. He forgot what he had done, or he tried to hide it.

It appears the fix is in no matter what the FBI’s circumscribed probe finds, but this indicates that Coons might have known about the bar fight before the rest of the public did. How? Remember, Coons is also a Yale Law alumnus; maybe he learned of it from fellow Yalies. Whatever the case, Coons’ question and Kavanaugh’s denial gave us another instance of Kavanaugh’s remarkably selective memory.