Jane Mayer

If you can, what was the world like before [Robert] Bork, [Clarence] Thomas and where we are now?

What do I know of it? You know, I suppose, just trying to think, because really the truth is, you can't really argue—you're tempted to say there was consensus and that kind of thing, but there really wasn't. Ever since Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court has been just a hot button and, you know, a frontier of some of the harshest fights in the country, right?

Right.

Yeah, OK. There wasn't really consensus necessarily before that.

So here's what some people say: There was the [Earl] Warren court; there was the [Warren] Burger court; and there were Democratic majorities always. There were Republican presidents, and every once in a while there would be an aberration, but basically the Democrats had their way in terms of the way the court was moving after 1955 or something, 1957, certainly from Brown on. The court itself was trending toward or tending to be more liberal until Reagan gets elected, and it's at that moment that suddenly people like [Ted] Kennedy (D-Mass.) and others understand that, oh, my God, the [Lewis] Powell seat is coming up; Bork is going to get in. The things that used to be tit for tat—we'll give you a liberal; you'll give us a conservative—were not quite so easy anymore.

I mean, it was by design that there was a war on the Supreme Court. Ed Meese, who was the attorney general to Reagan, identified the courts as one of the most important battle fronts. Really, the liberals hadn't quite caught up with this. I mean, there was sort of a kind of a mushy liberal consensus for a lot of that period, but they hadn't realized that this was going to be the battle zone. And the right really fixated on it, and Ed Meese especially… They saw it as an incredibly important institution to capture, and they started working on it.

… Reagan had appointed Sandra Day O'Connor and [William] Rehnquist earlier. They kind of slide through.

They were old-fashioned conservatives. They were just ordinary consensus Republicans, yeah.

But Bork was something different.

Bork's a revolutionary, really. He was a conservative intellectual who wanted to change the world and change jurisprudence. So, I mean, there was a reason why he set off a battle. He really had new ideas.

Tell me what you know about the earliest days of the Federalist Society. So really, if you take a look at the Federalist Society, you have to go back almost till 1971 to the Powell memo, which is when—later Justice Powell, but at that point he was just a lawyer—takes a look at all of the political unrest in the country in the 1960s, and warns that the establishment and big business is under fire, and that they've got to fight back, and if they're going to fight back, what they need to do is take over the key institutions in American society. And one of those key institutions—people often forget about it when they talk about the Powell memo—but one of the key institutions was the courts and the law. And he names that.

Flowing out of that was a very deliberate effort by conservatives to train up a new generation of conservative lawyers and get them on the courts, take over the courts, bring back the law, turn it hard right.

And where do they go? Who are they? How does it work from its earliest days?

Well, so they start—it's just a couple law students, really, working with a few professors at the University of Chicago and at Yale Law School, and they soon figure out where—everybody else does in the right wing at that point—about where to get hard-right money. The Koch brothers are these very wealthy funders of far right ideological groups. And so the Federalist Society gets early funds from the Kochs. The Federalist Society also gets money from a few other very far right foundations—the Olin Foundation in particular, the Bradley Foundation. There's this handful, this cluster of far-right foundations with tons of old money in them, and they start to nurture the Federalist Society.

What do they get for their buck?

They get one of the best bargains that anybody's bought in American politics. It didn't cost that much. It was such a smart move. They get generation after generation of right-wing legal lawyers who fight case after case to change the law and move the goalposts ever rightward in American society.

… That gets us, just for one more comment from you, that gets us across the '87 to '92 moment as we head for Thomas, who himself is a member of the Federalist Society.

Right, Clarence Thomas was one of the sort of early cadres of the Federalist Society, and he benefited from the mentorship and help from other members of the sort of conservative legal establishment. He was especially important to them because there weren't very many black members of the Federalist Society, and they wanted to show that they were not racist and that they did have black members.

… How does he get the nod to be the nominee when Thurgood Marshall announces his retirement?

Well, he's been on a short list of possible candidates. Before that, he's already at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He's been in part of the Bush administration. So he's on a short list. It's a very short list of possible black candidates who are hard-right members of the Federalist Society. And he's been on that list.

… So the people involved in the process, especially on the Republican side, having learned from the Bork moment, build their own war room at the fourth floor of the Eisenhower Office Building. Eleven lawyers arrive. They're going to do murder boards with Thomas. Tell me about the preparation that the Bush White House goes through to prepare Clarence Thomas, especially in the aftermath of what happened with Bork.

Well, I mean, they want to make sure that he comes across as not too ideological, not having too many controversial opinions, so they work with him to try to make sure he'll answer questions in the vaguest possible terms. And they also decide that the best way to package him is to tell his life story. So they focus on what they call the Pin Point story. He was from a tiny little town in Georgia, Pin Point, Ga., and it was a really hard-luck, hardscrabble story of his rise from a poor family. And they focus on that. At some point they even bussed in mostly women, some men, too, from Pin Point, Ga.

So you've got these sort of, you know, this wonderful picture of these kind of folksy, not particularly wealthy black people from Georgia who were there for Clarence Thomas. You know, he seems like a man of the people from his home state.

The optics of the committee when one steps back and looks at the pictures as I have done are, what?

All white men.

And the implications of that?

Well, I mean, they wanted to bend over backward to get him confirmed. They were, you know, walking on eggshells, not wanting to look at all racist. But in addition, when a black woman came forward and accused him, she had—there was not a single woman who might have understood her story from a woman's point of view.

Before we get to that, let's back up just a little bit. Who's around him? There's [John] Danforth (R-Mo.), there's [Reagan’s Chief of Staff] Kenny Duberstein.

There's, you know, Boyden Gray, [George H. W. Bush’s White House counsel].

Right, C. Boyden Gray.

C. Boyden Gray. There's the people— … basically, the people who were sort of shepherding Thomas, a lot of them were people who were the acolytes and henchmen to Ed Meese; they'd come from the Justice Department to help him through this process. So, you know, it's very closely tied in again to the same clique of far-right legal thinking that they were part of.

What do you mean, “help him through the process”?

Well, I mean, you know, they knew he was going to be grilled and that he'd have to go through hearings, confirmation hearings, and they wanted to make sure he didn't make any mistakes, he didn't do anything that allowed himself to be borked.

Kennedy and Biden (D-Del.)—Biden is the chairman; Kennedy, who had been so instrumental in borking Bork—are hamstrung in some way.

Well, I mean, you know, again, you've got Ted Kennedy, senator from Massachusetts, wanting to bend over backward not to seem like a white racist. He's got a black nominee in front of him, and he's got to be careful; he doesn't want to look like he's attacking him in some way that's untoward or racist. And Joe Biden, too, who was the chairman of the committee. You know, they seemed to have sort of tried to be extra polite, basically.

… As you researched and watched and thought about this story, does it feel—did it feel like a critical moment as it was unfolding, before Anita Hill?

You know, I think before Anita Hill, it just seemed like a bit of a cheat. Basically, they put in a not especially well-qualified black jurist to take the place of a black legend on the court, and the only thing that you really could see obviously was they'd been looking for somebody else with black skin to hold that seat. But there were many more qualified people they could have chosen at that point who were white, but they obviously just wanted to have a black person to fill Thurgood Marshall's seat.

… Alan Simpson (R-Wyo.) is given the charge by H. W. Bush to help shepherd Thomas in as well. These are people from the Bork hearings, veterans of the Bork moment, and they're determined somehow to get him not to say anything that will harm him, not to play Bork in any way, and, as you say, live and die on the “Pin Point strategy” as the way it would go. And it seems like it's working.

I think it was working quite well. I mean, the Pin Point strategy was a great PR strategy, and it seemed that Clarence Thomas was kind of sailing through. And then suddenly there was a hitch.

And the hitch comes from?

Anita Hill.

Tell us the how and the why.

Well, so, in the course of researching Clarence Thomas's record, the congressional aides who worked for the Senate Judiciary Committee had been poring over his past, and they wanted to find out more about him and just be sure. They, too, had been through the borking, and they didn't want to have some kind of horrible surprise about him. And in the course of doing this, they stumble across a woman named Anita Hill, who had also been a black graduate of Yale Law School and who had worked for Clarence Thomas at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, of all places, where she had confided in a few friends that Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her.

I think, although I'm not positive—this you will know—she first appears, I think, as an anonymous person.

Right. So what happens is, so word of Anita Hill begins to spread through this group of friends from Yale, and it eventually reaches the Hill staffers who are looking into Clarence Thomas, and they take a statement from her, but she wants to keep her name out of it. She doesn't want Clarence Thomas to know that she is providing this information, and she doesn't want her name to ever come out. But she agrees; she feels she has what she describes as a duty to report.

And she feels that what happened to her is important, and that those who are going to decide whether Clarence Thomas is fit for the Supreme Court should take it into account. And it was a devastating situation in her life. It was incredibly upsetting to her. And she just wants to make sure they have the full picture when they call her; she doesn't call them.

So she agrees after thinking it over to give them a statement after they call her. And she gives what she thinks is going to be an anonymous statement that they can look into more deeply.

And she can keep this anonymity for just a little while, but the truth is, inevitably, I guess, it's going to come out who she is, and she's going to have to make a decision to come forward. Why does she decide to come forward?

Well, word of it leaks out. Nina Totenberg, who's a fantastic reporter, catches wind of the fact that there's a statement from somebody about accusing Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment, and she goes on the air and describes it. And Anita Hill feels smoked out, and her name leaks out, and the next thing she's confronted with a dilemma: What is she going to do now? So the question is whether she's going to testify.

And—

She wants, I think, if I remember this right, one of the things that happens—you have to remember Anita Hill is a lawyer. She wants to be—she doesn't want to give a voluntary statement. She said, you know, the idea of confronting Clarence Thomas, who by this point is a very powerful figure in American society and in the legal world, she's not asking to come forward and do this; but if they subpoena her, she will agree to testify. And so she is subpoenaed to testify.

The problem of Anita Hill to Joe Biden.

Oh, my God. I mean, it was—it seems to have been a nightmare for Joe Biden. It made him incredibly uncomfortable. By now I've talked to a number of people who have worked for him over the years, and the whole subject of sexual harassment and the particulars of Anita Hill's accusation, which have to do with how Clarence Thomas had an unusual—just a tremendous interest in raunchy pornography, this was, it seemed to, apparently, to Joe Biden like this was kind of a private matter, the question of whether it should become public and disqualifying. As a man he felt uncomfortable about it. As a white man, he felt uncomfortable taking Clarence Thomas, a black man, on about it. And the whole subject matter just made him incredibly uncomfortable.

And Kennedy?

It was doubly bad for Ted Kennedy, who had recently—he had a long history of being accused of bad behavior with women. And in particular, at that point, his nephew had just been accused of rape, and he had been down at the same party in Palm Beach with his nephew. And there's sort of scandal—sexual scandal was hovering over the Kennedy family. It was as if he would rather be anywhere else than asking tough questions on this subject in front of the whole world.

… Now, you switch over to the Alan Simpson-Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) world, where they say: "What? What is this woman doing in here? What does this even have to do with anything?" I think Simpson said today, "It's now pushing Anita Hill, and it's about abortion. It's not at all about the substance of sexual harassment."

Oh, listen, I mean, at that point, I don't think most of those men even knew that there was such a thing as sexual harassment. I mean, this was an idea that was an alien concept to most of them. You have to go back and remember the times. There were very few such cases. These were men who were used to calling everybody “honey” and having the women work in their offices be cute. This was a new concept to a lot of them, and a threatening one, I think, also.

And basically, I mean, from the moment that Anita Hill's accusations, her statement came out of a fax machine, which was what used then, the minute the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee saw it, their reaction, as we report in Strange Justice, was to say categorical denial. That's what they were going to do. They didn't care what the facts were; they weren't even going to look into what Anita Hill—the truth was there. They were going to categorically deny whatever she said on behalf of Clarence Thomas, and, if it was necessary, destroy her in the process. …

So how does she find herself—just such an amazing image of her walking into that hearing. How does she find herself in that position?

So Anita Hill has been subpoenaed. She's agreed to come testify, and there's sort of a scramble to get her some legal team. Charles Ogletree, a fantastic law professor from Harvard Law School, who was also black and the son of a sharecropper, comes at her side, and several others. And she's got sort of like a small team of witnesses. And her parents come. She's one of 11 kids from a hardscrabble farm in the middle of Oklahoma, and they kind of come in with this incredible dignity, and they take their seats in this hearing, and the most sort of improbable testimony starts to unfold.

I mean, you could not—I was not in the room; I was watching it on television. You could not take your eyes off this thing. You couldn't believe that people were accusing each other of these things. And the Senate had probably never heard language like this before.

And it's on national television.

It was live on national television. It was one of the most incredible face-offs ever on national television. And it had, you know, race and sex and gender and power. It was—the whole thing was unfolding in this incredible melodrama.

So she says what she says. And the response of the Democrats is what?

Well, they try to support her. They, to some extent, take her side. But you can see that they're also kind of uncomfortable. But they try to get her at least something of a fair hearing. And then the Republicans come roaring in, and it becomes Clarence Thomas' turn to rebut what she has said.

The very astonishing cross-examination from Simpson is unbelievable in some ways when you look at it with field glasses from where we are now in society, given #MeToo and everything else, but just given where we are. And even then it was pretty shocking. Tell me about it.

Well, so she is trying in a very dignified and measured way to explain what her experience was with Clarence Thomas, and it's very embarrassing. It requires her to describe this kind of perverted pornography that he liked to talk to her about when he was her boss, and how he talked about the size of women's breasts, and I don't know, sex with animals, all this kind of thing. And she's kind of trying to march her way through it, you can see.

And then the Republicans on the committee get to cross-examine her, and they basically try to make her out to be a liar, unstable. They trot out these ideas like that she is what they call an erotomaniac, somebody who is basically mentally ill and imagining all of this. They bring in other witnesses to try to suggest that there's something wrong with her. And they've scoured the country looking for dirt on this woman.

They also, by the way, scoured her employment records when she worked for the federal government … to see if they could find private things to trip her up about her own employment record. They've gone through her law firm history to see if there's any dirt there when she was working in private practice.

Anyway, they just—they basically have a search-and-destroy mission to try to take her down. And their questions are vicious.

Why?

Because she stood between Clarence Thomas and the Supreme Court. They had to destroy her in order to get him confirmed. If what she was saying was true, he was a liar. If what she was saying was true, he had lied under oath. He denied everything that she said. He was under oath. He and his backers said he had no interest in pornography and that this was outrageous, that it couldn't possibly be true, which meant she had to be shown to be a liar.

So—

Then Clarence—then the “high-tech lynching.”

Yeah, that's where we're headed. This will resonate to people who only have watched the Kavanaugh hearings, but his answer, delivered, Simpson tell us that he sits in a room with them and basically gets him revved up and says—

So does Danforth.

And what do they say to him?

The message is: "Don't go halfway; don't apologize. You've got to categorically denial. You've got to deny everything categorically and come back swinging."

So he sits with a yellow pad, and he writes—do we believe that he came up with the phrase or that it was given to him?

Can I say something else here? Something that's always been interesting to me is that Clarence Thomas said that he never actually listened to Anita Hill's testimony. So it's interesting, if you think about it, that he was planning to refute testimony that he had never heard. So he didn't do her the courtesy of listening, or else maybe he didn't want to go through the pain of hearing what she had to say. But either way, I always—I think it's curious he never actually listened to her.

So did he write it? Did somebody tell him this phrase?

He worked it out with Ken Duberstein, who was working with the White House, one of his handlers, a great sort of political operative, and others, who came up with this fantastic phrase with him, which was to basically say that he was being put through what he called a “high-tech lynching.” He raised the “lynching” word. It obviously is one of the most explosive words you can come up with in American history, the most explosive word in racial history in America, evoking images of just a horrible racist process without any justice that was meant to kill him in the worst way, in front of the whole public. And he said it was cooked up only because he was trying to think for himself and think differently from the rest of the sort of black establishment.

Black conservative lawyer plays the race card to get on the Supreme Court of the United States, right?

He absolutely played the race card to get on the Supreme Court of the United States, and played the victim card, which of course his ideology is that nobody should be able to ever see themselves as a victim. But he sure played it, and it worked.

And it worked!

It was very powerful. I mean, what it did was it shamed these white senators, and it certainly seemed to shame the Democrats who had just been accused of lynching a black man.

I mean, the irony, of course, though, as anyone who has, you know, looked over this more carefully is, of course, the person who supposedly was, you know, behind this lynch mob was a black woman, Anita Hill, who was herself a black African American, who had no racial animus toward anyone, let alone Clarence Thomas.

Her hope, from what I can tell from your book, her hope was that she'd have support; she wouldn't be the lonely voice; it wouldn't be just her versus—a he said/she said with Clarence Thomas.

So the cliché that came out of the Clarence Thomas/Anita Hill confrontation at the time was, "Oh, this is just a he said/she said kind of fight, and no one will be able to tell what the truth is here." And it was obvious to Anita Hill and her lawyers, and to everybody else, really, that if the whole thing turned on credibility, the credibility of the accuser, she was going to need to have backup support, somebody to speak for her credibility. So it was very important that she be able to bring in other witnesses who could corroborate her, so her team scurried to get them ready to testify. And there were several women who actually wanted to testify on her behalf, but they didn't get the chance.

… There was another witness named Angela Wright, and she had worked at the EEOC also, along with Anita Hill, and she, too, had stories to tell about how Clarence Thomas had spoken inappropriately and sexually to her when she worked for him, also at the EEOC. And her stories were also very graphic. And if, I think, if people had realized that there were two such women, it would have been an enormous help to Anita Hill. But Angela Wright came to Washington, was watching the hearings from a hotel room, waiting to be called, and she never got called as a witness.

When Thomas is confirmed, he's 43 years old. Near the end of your book it’s devastating when he says: "I'm 43. I'm going to spend 43 basically getting even."

Is he close? Where are we now?

He's only 70. … … OK, so let's do a little step-up to 20,000 or 30,000 feet now and say, what do we know about how the process has changed Bork through Thomas? What was once a kind of advice and consent and maybe even an old-boys'-network kind of thing meant people voted 97-3, or whatever it was, for people. Bork is a no, and Thomas is—what was the final vote on Thomas?

52-48.

There you go. So suddenly there are all kinds of—

You know, I mean, the confirmation vote for Clarence Thomas was the closest vote for a Supreme Court justice in American history until that point. And so, what did we learn? That Supreme Court fights are incredibly political at this point, and that the country's divided, and that this is going to be one of the hardest fought battle zones. That's what you learned. And they've learned some techniques, too. Both sides have learned not to let on anything that might be controversial that one of these justices might think or do. They're going to hide out as much as they can from whatever their ideology is.

'92 and 2016? I mean, what's happened between 1992 and 2016 is that the Federalist Society has grown from a kind of an interesting and small group of ideological lawyers to a gigantically important and huge group of a legal powerhouse in America.

How?

The numbers are enormous. The money is enormous. And every important conservative jurist is a member. All the conservative members of the Supreme Court and the rest of the courts on down through America. If you want to get anywhere in America and you're conservative and a lawyer, and you want to go in the legal profession, go far, you've got to join the Federalist Society by then.

And what is happening to make that valuable? How does it work?

Well, it's like an underground railroad for jobs. I mean, it's just basically they help each other along. They give each other jobs. They promote each other. They credential the young lawyers so that they can move up in the profession. It's just a hugely powerful guild.

So if you had a desire to be a judge someday and you're a smart, conservative, recent law school graduate, you'd be crazy not to join the Federalist Society.

You'd have to.

So when you get to the moment that Brett Kavanaugh is announced by Donald Trump, in a way over his own objections, the Democrats are in what kind of a position, literally in the hours Kavanaugh is announced?

I think the thing that people may not realize is I think most Democrats, when Kavanaugh was chosen, first of all, they know that this is going to be the incredibly important swing seat, but they also can see the handwriting on the wall. You've got a Republican in the White House. And I think the initial reaction of many, at least in Washington, was that Democrats thought, well, Brett Kavanaugh's probably as good as we're going to do. He was kind of a clubbable-seeming guy. He was likable. He could talk sports. He'd invited Elena Kagan to come and talk to the Federalist Society. He doesn't come off as a radical, angry ideologue, unlike, say, maybe Bork or Scalia, some of these others.

It's true, but when you go back and you look at the 24/7 news sites, look at the people on the committee—[Richard] Blumenthal (D-Conn.), [Amy] Klobuchar (D-Minn.)—they were like, “He's evil; we're never going to go for him!”

Well, they're all—I mean, I think—but that was sort of—there was this—there was a kind of public position that a lot of the Democrats in the Senate took where they said, you know, we're going to fight, and we're going to look hard at him, and all that kind of stuff. Within the liberal legal community, there was a lot of doubt about that. I think people just thought they're going to let him slide through. I really don't think that—I think there was a wish, maybe, that the Democrats would fight about it, but I don't think people thought this was going to be the biggest—I don't think they thought they could get him. I really don't think they thought they could stop him.

So did they need to put up a fight for show?

They needed to put up a fight to make their arguments, to show that there is another way to look at the law. And they wanted to—many of them wanted to have, in the hearings, a fight over legal issues. They wanted to really show that there's a difference in point of view from the Democratic side than the Republican on these legal issues. They didn't want to have a dirty fight, though.

So day one.

I mean, that's especially true of, I think, Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.). She's the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and she pretty much made clear to her troops or minions and her colleagues on the committee that she was willing to have, you know, a really serious argument over Kavanaugh's ideology and his point of view, but she didn't want this to be some kind of dirty political fight about his personality or his personal life.

We're not going to attack character; we'll go for qualification.

She didn't want it to be about character from the start.

So now explain something to me, especially if it's true that in the legal community everybody felt pretty sanguine about Kavanaugh.

That was sort of the private view, I think, of people. If you really want to know, I mean, I do think that's what people were saying. You know, and he's from—part of it also, you know, he's from Washington, D.C., where the people who would lead such a fight are. So a lot of people knew him personally. And he was liked. He's relatively liked on the bench in the appeals court. You know, he had Democratic colleagues who didn't hate him. So there were all these sort of tea leaves that suggested he was going to somehow squeak through.

So how do you explain the protesters and the vehemence in the halls of Congress that very first day? I've watched this video 100 times. [Chuck] Grassley (R-Iowa) walks him in. The cameras part like the Red Sea. He sits down, and Grassley taps his thing, and he gets about 13 words out and the Democrats just roar! And then the Republicans roar! And it's like this microcosm of our divided politics right before our eyes, and before the eyes of the nation, one more television spectacle.

… Anybody who was nominated was going to be in the midst of an absolutely knockdown, drag-out political brawl because that seat meant so much. So he may be as good as the Democrats thought they were going to get, but that wasn't very good. They didn't want to lose that seat to anyone, and that seat meant the whole court's chemistry and balance was going to tip. So they were going to give him hell no matter what.

It seems like what everybody says, if you're in the chair, you're 90 percent there. So it seems like he's going to cruise along, and there's this sort of back-and-forth and some arguments, but nothing significant. And then, the weekend and more, you play a role in this in some way, of the revelations of an anonymous source who has some allegations, in a kind of weird déjà vu sense that sweeps us all out in the land, about him. Walk me through. You don't have to go super-duper detailed, but walk me through the high points of what occurs.

So it's [27] years later, right?

Yeah.

OK. So, so, so [27] years later after Anita Hill there's another woman who knows something else about another Supreme Court nominee. And she is, much like Anita Hill, not at all sure she wants to ever come forward publicly. But at the same time, much like Anita Hill, she thinks what happened to her was terrible. She had a horrible experience at the hands of this nominee, and she thinks that whoever is going to decide on whether he's fit for the Supreme Court should know it.

So she's in this dilemma about what to do with this information, and her first thought is that when there's a long list of people that might be chosen for the Supreme Court, she should get this information somehow to whoever is putting that list together, because it could not knock him off the long list and keep him from being put on the short list, and that then she'd serve some purpose. She's afraid that if she comes out later than that, it's going to be a no-win position that she doesn't want to be in. But she's hoping maybe she can affect things in a good way early on.

And what happens?

Well, she goes to her congresswoman. She talks to a few friends. She eventually even leaves an anonymous account on a tip line at The Washington Post. But she doesn't want to be identified. So everybody is very mindful of her privacy, and it gets nowhere.

… So what makes her come forward?

… Just like Anita Hill, her account is leaked. Word of her leaks out without her name at first, and then when the news breaks that there is such a story, she then decides, "If anyone's going to tell that story, I'm going to tell it myself." So she gives an interview.

…When you heard about it, put you in the story a little bit as a reporter. You knew all the details of the Anita Hill moments and the Anita Hill testimony, and you hear that another woman is coming. What do you think?

Well, I wasn't sure exactly what the details of her allegations were. I thought initially that if this is something that dates back to high school, when you're talking about people who are not yet legally adults, I thought there would be a lot more latitude for bad behavior and that people would not likely stop a Supreme Court justice from being confirmed about something he did in high school, unless it was something so heinous, you know, rape or something like that.

So I mean, I thought it was iffy whether it would make the huge difference. And so I just, I wasn't sure.

Do you have any idea what Sen. Feinstein thought of it, thought about this very issue we're talking about?

My sense as a reporter is that she didn't think it was important enough to make it public and that she was content with the idea of keeping it in a desk drawer.

So why did it get out? Do you have any idea?

I think it got out partly because Christine Blasey Ford herself was ambivalent to some extent and had spoken to enough people, friends and others, who felt she should speak out. So the word just leaked out. It got—you know, there were a lot of people who wanted her to come forward, and I think eventually that's how the word got out.

As it starts to come out—

Can I just say one other thing?

Yes.

In fairness to Feinstein, you know, the other thing that was very important to Feinstein was that Christine Blasey Ford's statement about what had happened to her was confidential. She didn't want her name out, and I think that Dianne Feinstein felt that she owed it to her to keep it quiet unless she wanted to go public. But she didn't push her to go public, that's for sure.

So your thoughts, your impression of [Blasey Ford] as somebody testifying.

You know, I didn't know what to expect. I had heard—I'd read her statement, but I'd never heard her speak until she came out to testify, and I thought it was much more powerful in reality than it had been on the paper. She clearly was so upset by what this had done to her life. It was—and she seemed quite believable and sensitive and intelligent and articulate. It was a bad moment for Kavanaugh…

…. and so what happens is, when Brett Kavanaugh comes out to respond to Christine Blasey Ford, for me anyway, it was like watching Clarence Thomas all over again. This was another version of the high-tech lynching. He just came out swinging and angry and torqued up and emotional. It was like a different person than the one who'd given the Fox interview just a couple days before. It was, I mean, he was just out to obliterate her.

But our eyes are on Flake, Murkowski and Collins. Can you imagine that performance had an effect on at least the two women?

Well, one of the things that he did was, he came out and he accused his accusers of doing this for political reasons. He started talking about the Clintons and the Clinton machine and all this kind of thing. I mean, he took the allegations away from Christine Blasey Ford and turned it into a huge fight between Democrats and Republicans. He's trying to rally all the Republicans to his side and all the Republicans who are watching it, too, and, you know, I mean, it was obviously a play for every vote he could get because he knew he was hanging by a thread.

Do you think it was something—I mean, what are you thinking about for Collins and Flake? You know, I mean, I think it was such an angry performance. There was a downside to it, you know, which was that he would alienate the moderates on the committee whose votes were desperately needed, and that included Susan Collins in particular.

OK, so let me ask you the last question. If it was political theater—and it was—and it's a really important thing—and it is—and he revealed the politicalness of it in his statement when he comes back and he's just firing away and he's accusing the Clintons and everything else. And we know the old saw, that the court doesn't have an army and it doesn't have anything; the thing that it really needs to survive is the will of the people, that they believe that it's a sort of, generally speaking, fair institution, not a political, not an ideological organization, even though people may have individual ideologies. And we've certainly seen, [John] Roberts seems to try to get the White House to back off from trying to overpoliticize, but he has in his hands a new justice who's just been through a political process that seems almost inevitably to adhere to him for the rest of his career. What's changed, over the two hours we've had this conversation, the cases we've talked about? What has happened to the court itself?

I just think that it's been a process over decades that's been in the making, going from Bork on through to Kavanaugh.

But what seemed like a sort of shocking freak occurrence when it happened with Bork now seems like a fait accompli with Kavanaugh. He now is up there on the bench, and everybody assumes it's only because of politics and that the court itself is political. And that is a shame.

The implications?

Well, the implications are that justice isn't blind up there as it's supposed to be, or that it's not about right and wrong; it's about Republican versus Democrat, and that's not how cases are supposed to be decided.