After Senator Kamala Harris grilled SCOTUS nominee Brett Kavanaugh about any conversations he had with someone at former Trump lawyer Marc Kasowitz' law firm, the denials flowed.
"There have been no discussions regarding Robert Mueller’s investigation between Judge Kavanaugh and anyone at our firm,” Kasowitz spokesman told The Washington Post.
On Thursday, Kavanaugh stuck to his guns: He had not had a conversation with anyone at that law firm about the Mueller investigation, and was in fact still confused about why this was even a question.
Here is why it was a question: Marc Kasowitz wrote a letter of opinion for Trump about the Mueller investigation, and that letter had some obscure footnotes which align with Brett Kavanaugh's views on executive power.
OH. Well, how did that happen, anyway? How could those obscure points end up in that letter from Kasowitz? How can that BE?
Here's how. Kavanaugh knew, when Senator Harris asked him yesterday, exactly who she was thinking of: A Kasowitz partner by the name of Ed McNally, who also happened to be a very close associate of Kavanaugh's when they worked together in the White House.
Carol Leonig reported on Twitter that Kavanaugh acknowledged a "close friendship" with McNally, but denied (as did the White House), that they ever spoke about the Mueller investigation.
Those denials are not under oath, of course. They are simply denials to the press.
McNally wasn't just a boat passing in the night. Via The New York Times:
Edward McNally, who worked on homeland security legal issues in the White House, said Mr. Kavanaugh had to ensure that every word of proposed executive orders or speeches was vetted by the relevant agencies before going to the president, sometimes trying to reconcile competing views. “He was regarded as a fair, neutral, straightforward arbiter,” Mr. McNally said.
According to the acknowledgements in Alberto Gonzales' book, McNally and Kavanaugh were two of the people who always attended staff meetings:
When Senator Harris told Kavanaugh she thought he was thinking of a person and didn't want to say (in the video above), she knew exactly who she was talking about, and you should assume that his unwillingness to step up and admit he had a good friend who was a partner at that firm in the same office with Marc Kasowitz who signed the letter of opinion for Donald Trump was for a reason.
Watch the exchange between them again in the video above and see it in a whole new light.
