The Hits Keep Coming for Bart O'Kavanaugh

The hits just keep coming for Bart O’Kavanaugh—excuse me, Brett Kavanaugh—the very angry bro who loves beer, apparently lying while under oath, and allegedly assaulting women and yet continues to believe he deserves a seat on the Supreme Court. New reports continue to not only paint a disturbing and belligerent portrait of Kavanaugh as a young man, but also—again—throw some serious doubt onto his claims that he never drank to excess as a high school or college student and about parts of his testimony during last week’s Senate Judiciary Committee Hearing.

On Monday, the New York Times reported that when he was a junior at Yale, Kavanaugh was involved in a bar fight in which he was accused of throwing ice on another man, one Dom Cozzolino, according to a police report. Kavanaugh, when questioned by the police, refused “to say if he threw the ice or not.” Kavanaugh’s friend Chris Dudley (who has recently supported Kavanaugh and refuted the stories of his friend’s excessive drinking) also got involved, allegedly throwing a glass at Cozzolino. Bleeding from his ear, Cozzolino had to go to a hospital. Kavanaugh was not arrested for his role in the fight.

This is the incident that Kavanaugh’s college friend and classmate Chad Ludington referred to in a statement he issued on Sunday, in which he wrote: “On one of the last occasions I purposely socialized with Brett, I witnessed him respond to a semi-hostile remark, not by defusing the situation, but by throwing his beer in the man’s face and starting a fight that ended with one of our mutual friends in jail.”

The genesis of the fight, you may be asking? A case of mistaken identity that somehow involved UB40 of “Red Red Wine” “fame.” As Ludington told the Times:

He said that the altercation happened after a UB40 concert on Sept. 25, when he and a group of people went to Demery’s and were drinking pints. At one point, they were sitting near a man who, they thought, resembled Ali Campbell, the lead singer of UB40.

“We’re trying to figure out if it’s him,” he said.

When the man noticed Mr. Ludington, Mr. Kavanaugh and the others looking at him, he objected and told them to stop it, adding an expletive, Mr. Ludington said.

Mr. Kavanaugh cursed, he said, and then “threw his beer at the guy.”

“The guy swung at Brett,” Mr. Ludington continued. At that point, Mr. Dudley “took his beer and smashed it into the head of the guy, who by now had Brett in an embrace. I then tried to pull Chris back, and a bunch of other guys tried to pull the other guy back. I don’t know what Brett was doing in the melee, but there was blood, there was glass, there was beer and there was some shouting, and the police showed up.”

Yes, the kind of things that good, upstanding boys who totally don’t get wasted do!

And it turns out that Kavanaugh was also possibly lying about when he first learned of the allegations of Deborah Ramirez, the woman who has said that Kavanaugh exposed his penis to her at a party when they were undergraduates at Yale.

During last week’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, Senator Orrin Hatch asked Kavanaugh when he found out about Ramirez’s allegations. Kavanaugh replied, “In the last—in the period since then, the New Yorker story.”

But according to text messages obtained by NBC News and reported out on Monday evening, it appears that Kavanaugh had known of her allegations prior to the publication of her story in the New Yorker.

The text messages between two of Kavanaugh’s friends, Kerry Berchem and Karen Yarasavage, apparently show that Kavanaugh and his team were already in communication with his former classmates at Yale and trying to get people to refute Ramirez’s story in advance of the New Yorker’s publication of her account on September 23.

Per NBC News:

In a series of texts before the publication of the New Yorker story, Yarasavage wrote that she had been in contact with “Brett’s guy,” and also with “Brett,” who wanted her to go on the record to refute Ramirez. According to Berchem, Yarasavage also told her friend that she turned over a copy of the wedding party photo to Kavanaugh, writing in a text: “I had to send it to Brett’s team too.”

…

Further, the texts show Kavanaugh may need to be questioned about how far back he anticipated that Ramirez would air allegations against him. Berchem says in her memo that Kavanaugh “and/or” his friends “may have initiated an anticipatory narrative” as early as July to “conceal or discredit” Ramirez.

Berchem has submitted a memo detailing these text messages to the FBI, but has yet to receive a response. (A spokesperson for Senator Chuck Grassley told NBC News that “the texts from Ms. Berchem do not appear relevant or contradictory to Judge Kavanaugh’s testimony.”)

The White House appears to be scrambling to keep up with the many revelations coming out in recent days. On Monday, Donald Trump announced that he had authorized the FBI to broaden the scope of its investigation into the numerous sexual misconduct and assault allegations against his Supreme Court nominee, no longer restricting it to the four people initially included on the list of interviews.

The FBI has until Friday to wrap up its investigation. Whether these new revelations will be included remains to be seen.