Oh, Those Optics

“There is nothing independent about her opinion,” Fairstein said. “She is a hired gun giving an opinion for the side that hired her.”

If you're not the right person to question a witness in a Senate committee hearing, then you're not the right person to be a Senator. 

Please, Repubs - stop floating all that bullshit about how open and honest and fair you're trying to be.

Emma Brown and Seung Min Kim, WaPo:

The prosecutor hired by Republican senators to question Christine Blasey Ford has declared that Ford’s allegations of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett M. Kavanaugh are so weak that no “reasonable prosecutor” would pursue the case.

“A ‘he said, she said’ case is incredibly difficult to prove. But this case is even weaker than that,” Rachel Mitchell, a Repub­lican sex-crimes prosecutor from Arizona, wrote Sunday in a five-page memorandum, highlighting what she described as inconsistencies in Ford’s account and a lack of corroboration from potential witnesses.

Though Senate Republicans said the memo was helpful, legal experts from both political parties and advocates for victims of sexual assault on Monday questioned how Mitchell could reach such a conclusion without a fuller investigation and without the ability to cross-examine witnesses such as Mark Judge, the only other person Ford says was in the room when the alleged incident occurred in the summer of 1982.

“As a former prosecutor myself, I’ve come to no conclusion other than the conclusion that there needs to be more facts to come to a conclusion,” said Douglas Wigdor, an employment lawyer who has represented plaintiffs in sexual assault and harassment cases. Wigdor, a Republican, called the memo “a joke” and “preposterous.”
- and -

Tasha Menacker, chief strategy officer for the Arizona Coalition to End Sexual and Domestic Violence, said she has heard survivors talking in recent days about how their experiences match the experience described by Ford, including an inability to pinpoint when their assault occurred or other such details.

“I’m afraid that survivors in Maricopa County are going to see this and relate to Dr. Ford, and be concerned about whether or not they would be believed,” she said. “Survivors are going to see this and say, ‘I wouldn’t be able to be consistent in my recollections either, remember specific dates either.’ ”

Matthew Long, a defense attorney who once worked for Mitchell as a sex-crimes prosecutor, was quoted as calling her “the best” in a story in a local newspaper last week, before the memo was issued. On Monday, Long said he was surprised to see that she cited Ford’s gaps in memory as evidence of the weakness of her allegation.

“The things that she’s highlighting that say that Dr. Ford is not credible are the very things she has taught me to ignore and not rely on,” he said in an interview. The memo, he said, “demonstrates she’s abandoned what she knows to be true in favor of being a political operative.”