What Did Brett Kavanaugh Know About His Former Boss's Sexual Misconduct?

By Irin Carmon

Mazie Hirono, senator from Hawaii and, lately, giver of no fucks, will have her chance to question Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh Wednesday, and one query in particular will come as no surprise. Since January, Hirono has asked each and every nominee, judicial or otherwise, whether they’ve ever sexually harassed or assaulted anyone, or been disciplined for doing so.

“Any time there’s a power situation, these kinds of behaviors can occur, and I just want to make sure that this does not get swept under the rug,” she told me last week. “Since time immemorial we women have been having to put up with this bullshit.”

Kavanaugh’s hearing presents both the highest-profile forum yet for this line of questioning, and an opportunity to complicate it. That’s because for all you heard on the first day of the hearings about Kavanaugh’s exemplary relationships with women — coaching them, mentoring them, hiring them, working on cases with them (anything but denying them an abortion) — Hirono is interested in hearing more about Kavanaugh’s longstanding ties to one disgraced man, his former boss Judge Alex Kozinski, who retired in December after being accused of touching or making unwanted sexual comments toward 15 women, some of them clerks. “I’d like to know what kind of awareness did Judge Kavanaugh have about Judge Kozinski’s behavior, which spread over years,” says Hirono.

A White House spokesman said in July that Kavanaugh “had never heard any allegations of sexual misconduct or sexual harassment by Judge Kozinski” before they were reported in the Washington Post.

Kavanaugh clerked for Kozinski, then on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, from 1991 to 1992. Until recently, the two were part of an elite group that pre-interviewed law students for clerkships with Justice Anthony Kennedy, whom Kavanaugh seeks to replace. The two men sat on panels together; on one at the Federalist Society, Politico reported, Kavanaugh “praised a 1991 article Kozinski wrote about judicial clerkship selection, titled ‘Confessions of a Bad Apple.’” He even hired Kozinski’s son to clerk for him. Bill Burck, the lawyer who is charged with deciding which of Kavanaugh’s documents get publicly released, is a former Kozinski clerk who represented the judge after the accusations.

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https://www.thecut.com/2018/09/kavanaugh-confirmation-kozinski-sexual-assault.html