United States Senate Judiciary Committee

The United States Senate Judiciary Committee became the institutional arena for Christine Blasey Ford’s allegation against Brett Kavanaugh during his Supreme Court nomination. The committee’s negotiations determined how Ford would be heard, which witnesses would be called, and what forms of evidence would be accepted; those procedural choices shaped the public contest over her account.

Role in the nomination

The committee was responsible for the confirmation hearing and, as the dispute unfolded, for working out how to address Ford’s allegation. Its authority became part of the controversy itself. Republicans on the committee maintained that it had both the authority and the ability to investigate, even as Ford’s legal team sought an investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The bureau declined, saying it considered Kavanaugh’s background check closed.

The negotiations took place without an established protocol for evaluating an allegation of sexual harassment or assault against a Supreme Court nominee. Anita Hill, recalling her own testimony twenty-seven years earlier, warned that the committee still lacked specific procedures and had learned too little from the earlier hearing or the #MeToo movement. In this account, the absence of agreed rules was not a technical gap: the timing, format, and participants in Ford’s testimony all remained matters to be contested.

Negotiating Ford’s testimony

Ford’s team rejected the committee’s offers to interview her privately and negotiated instead over the conditions of a hearing. In carefully worded emails and terse phone calls, her attorneys, Debra Katz and Lisa Banks, pressed the committee to subpoena Mark Judge, whom Ford said had been in the room during the alleged assault. Ford had also described seeing Judge afterward at a neighborhood grocery store, where she remembered him appearing uncomfortable.

The negotiations exposed a disagreement over who could set the terms of participation. Chuck Grassley’s staff told Ford’s lawyers that the committee did not accept subpoena requests from witnesses as a condition of testifying. Mike Davis, the Republican staff member leading the negotiations, handled the committee’s side of the talks. Ford asked her attorneys to communicate collegially and maintained that coming forward was not a partisan act. The committee’s process was nevertheless understood through competing political interpretations, as well as through the practical question of whether Ford would testify and under what conditions.

Witnesses and the limits of the record

Although Ford’s team sought Judge’s in-person testimony, the committee accepted a written statement from him. Judge acknowledged that he had been friends with Kavanaugh in high school, but said he did not remember the party Ford described and had never seen Kavanaugh behave as she alleged. The committee also accepted a written statement from P. J. Smyth, another person Ford recalled being at the party. Smyth said he had no memory of the gathering, considered Kavanaugh a person of integrity, and had not seen him act improperly toward women.

The written statements were not equivalent to testimony before the committee. By declining to require the potential witnesses to appear in person, the committee left their accounts outside the same questioning process Ford faced. The book presents that decision as narrowing the inquiry: with possible witnesses not testifying, the dispute was reduced toward a choice between believing Ford and believing Kavanaugh.

Hearing process and institutional significance

The committee’s negotiations shaped not only whether Ford would appear but also the conditions in which she would speak. Before the hearing, Ford met with her lawyers and advisers in a conference room at the Watergate Hotel. Her legal team had drafted an opening statement, but Ford rewrote nearly all of it because it did not sound like her and did not present her account in the order or language she wanted. The preparation reflected how much depended on the hearing’s formal setting and on Ford’s ability to give her account in her own words.

The committee’s handling of the allegation thus became part of the story it was convened to examine. Its authority to conduct the proceedings did not settle questions about fairness or credibility. The negotiations over private interviews, an FBI investigation, subpoenas, and written statements determined what the committee could hear—and what the public would be left to weigh.