Brett Kavanaugh letter exposed as a fraud
Donald Trump’s nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, which is already falling apart amid an attempted rape allegation, has now taken yet another scandalous turn. Senate Republicans tried to paint Kavanaugh as having the support of the African-American community by reading aloud a letter from eight members of the Harvard Law School’s chapter of the Black Law Students Association during the Kavanaugh hearings. The trouble: the letter was a fake.
Adrian Perkins, who is running for Mayor of Shreveport, Louisiana, is one of the eight people who purportedly authored the letter. But now Perkins is telling his local newspaper, the Shreveport Times, that he never signed off on the letter. For that matter, he’s spelling out that he could not possibly have served as a character reference for Kavanaugh because “I did not attend the BSLA event referenced, never had a class with or met Judge Kavanaugh, and did not authorize the use of my name in that capacity.”
It’s not yet clear who is responsible for fraudulently listing Adrian Perkins as a signee of the letter. It’s also unclear who, if anyone, in the GOP knew the letter was a fraud when Republican Senator Mike Crapo read it aloud during Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings. This is the second “support letter” for Kavanaugh that’s faced controversy.
Almost immediately after the attempted rape allegation was anonymously made, Senate Republicans published a list of sixty-five women who knew Kavanaugh and supported him. None of those women have claimed to have been fraudulently included. However, after Dr. Christine Blasey Ford came forward as the accuser and offered additional details, Politico could only find a few women from the list who were still willing to support him.
