United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary

The United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary is the Senate body that holds hearings for Supreme Court nominees. In the account of Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation against Brett Kavanaugh, it becomes more than the venue for a confirmation proceeding: it is the institution whose choices about confidentiality, questioning, witnesses, and investigation shaped how the allegation could be heard. The episode shows a process being negotiated while the political stakes were already high and no settled protocol commanded agreement.

Institutional Role and the Confidential Letter

In July 2018, while staying with her parents in Rehoboth Beach as her grandmother was near death, Ford received a call from Anna Eshoo’s office asking her to write to the committee about what she said had happened with Kavanaugh. Ford had repeated the account before, but the request gave it a new institutional destination. She worried that sending it to both the committee’s Democratic ranking member, Dianne Feinstein, and its Republican chair, Chuck Grassley, would increase the chance that her identity and account became public. She addressed the letter only to Feinstein, relying on the confidentiality she understood the senator’s office to have described.

Feinstein later called Ford to ask about the incident and promised to keep the letter confidential. Ford then began to grasp the power the document might acquire under the Capitol dome, and recognized that she needed legal help to retain some control over her account. The first Washington firms she approached declined to take the case. Lawrence Robbins, an attorney with experience before the Supreme Court, listened to her and considered her recollections and corroboration worthy of serious attention, but could not represent her publicly because his partners feared the effect on the firm’s appellate cases. He could help only behind the scenes.

On August 6, shortly after her grandmother died, Ford met Debra Katz and Lisa Banks near the Baltimore airport. Feinstein’s office had connected them with her because they handled this kind of allegation. The lawyers had first received general questions about what might be done with an old assault allegation, then a description of Ford’s account without her name. For Ford, their prompt availability mattered alongside their expertise: the choice to seek representation was unfolding within a narrow window and against the strain of a family bereavement.

Negotiating the Hearing

When the committee began arranging Ford’s appearance, there was no agreed procedure for handling an allegation against a Supreme Court nominee. Ford’s team sought an FBI investigation, hoping impartial investigators could shed light on an event said to have occurred decades earlier. The FBI declined, saying Kavanaugh’s background check was closed, while Republicans on the committee maintained that the Senate had the authority and ability to investigate. Ford’s lawyers rejected offers to interview her privately, and negotiations shifted to the terms of a hearing: its timing, format, and participants.

The uncertainty was not merely logistical. Anita Hill, whose own testimony had occurred twenty-seven years earlier, warned that the committee still lacked a specific protocol for evaluating allegations of harassment or assault against a nominee. In her assessment, the handling of her earlier testimony had sent employers a damaging signal about how complaints could be mishandled; the continued absence of clear rules suggested little had been learned from that episode or from the more recent #MeToo movement. In the present case, the process was effectively being assembled as the two sides negotiated.

Ford’s lawyers pressed for Mark Judge, Kavanaugh’s former friend and, according to Ford, another person present during the alleged incident, to be subpoenaed and testify in person. The committee’s staff refused to accept a witness’s demand for subpoenas as a condition of testifying. Instead, it accepted written statements from Judge and P. J. Smyth, another former friend whom Ford recalled being at the gathering. Judge acknowledged his friendship with Kavanaugh but said he did not remember the party or seeing the conduct Ford described. Smyth likewise said he had no memory of the gathering and had not seen Kavanaugh behave improperly toward women. With potential witnesses not appearing in person, the dispute narrowed in public to competing accounts and judgments of credibility.

Public Testimony and the Committee’s Questions

As Ford’s testimony approached, the committee’s procedures remained part of the conflict. Republican senators gave their questioning time to Rachel Mitchell, an experienced prosecutor, rather than appear as an all-male group of questioners. The decision changed who would ask the questions, but it did not remove the scrutiny Ford faced: the account notes that senators and the wider public would be listening for gaps, inconsistencies, or awkwardness in her answers.

Ford and her lawyers prepared in a small conference room at the Watergate Hotel. The draft opening statement, prepared by Katz, a junior attorney, and Michael Bromwich, drew on details Ford had given the lawyers and the press. Ford rewrote nearly all of it because it did not sound like her and did not put the material in the order she wanted. Robbins and Bromwich offered guidance on answering multipart or ambiguous questions and ran through the demands of congressional testimony. Ford declined to rehearse responses. She believed she knew what she could and could not recall, and worried instead about speaking before cameras; she continued to ask why the committee could not hear her in a closed session.

Investigation, Limits, and Consequences

The FBI investigation ultimately remained narrow. Investigators interviewed Judge, Smyth, Leland Keyser, and an attorney for one of the witnesses, but did not interview Ford or Kavanaugh. The investigation found no corroboration of Ford’s allegation; the book also notes no corroboration of Deborah Ramirez’s allegation. The account therefore distinguishes between the investigation’s stated finding and the unresolved question of what happened decades earlier: the inquiry did not settle that question for the people involved.

The committee’s handling of Ford belongs to a wider landscape in which formal legal routes could be difficult to use. The book describes federal harassment law as weak in coverage, excluding some freelancers and employees of smaller workplaces; a filing deadline could be as short as 180 days, and damages were capped at $300,000. Settlements were often more predictable than litigation, while the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission could be required to settle and keep information confidential. That background does not make the committee a substitute court. It does, however, clarify why the rules governing a Senate hearing mattered: the committee’s choices determined which testimony and witnesses entered the public record, while the wider system offered no simple alternative route to a definitive account.

On the eve of the Senate’s first vote on whether to advance Kavanaugh’s nomination, Ford sought one more opportunity to address the process. On October 4 she finished a private letter to Senator Jeff Flake, thanking him for his kindness; Lisa Banks sent it to his private email that night, and a courier delivered a hard copy the next morning. The letter came after the FBI inquiry had left the central historical question unresolved. In this sequence, the committee’s proceedings do not culminate in a settled finding about the allegation. Instead, the hearing process, its limits, and Ford’s effort to retain a voice within it become part of the story’s central institutional record.