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The memo about Kavanaugh from GOP’s handpicked prosecutor is about what you’d expect

This seems about par for the course for how sexual predation is handled in America.

Rachel Mitchell grilled Dr. Christine Blasey Ford at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing
Rachel Mitchell grilled Dr. Christine Blasey Ford at the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last Thursday. CREDIT: Michael Reynolds-Pool/Getty Images

The GOP’s handpicked prosecutor — the person to whom Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) and his Senate Judiciary Committee’s Republican majority outsourced their questioning of Christine Blasey Ford last week — needed just 15 minutes of questioning Donald Trump’s pick for a lifetime Supreme Court appointment before concluding that he should not be charged.

Rachel Mitchell, an unelected Republican prosecutor, methodically questioned Ford about her allegations that Brett Kavanaugh attempted to rape her in the 1980s. But when it came time to ask Kavanaugh about her claims, Mitchell was benched by the committee after just 15 minutes of questions.

Even that 15 minute “interview” with Kavanaugh was spent, in part, on introductory remarks, establishing guidelines for her questions, and confirming that he understood her legal definition of “sexual behavior.”

Though the committee’s Republican senators opted to interrupt Mitchell’s questioning of Kavanaugh to instead spend the duration of the hearing lambasting their Democratic colleagues and apologizing to the alleged sexual predator, Mitchell still determined that she had enough information to make a call no one needed her to make.

In a five-page memo sent Sunday to just the Republicans on the committee, Mitchell provided her self-described “independent assessment” that a “reasonable prosecutor” would not bring a case against Kavanaugh “based on the evidence before the committee” and that there is not a “preponderance-of-the-evidence” against the judge.

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The remainder of Mitchell’s memo is essentially a rehash of the committee’s majority talking points, attempting to poke small holes in Ford’s testimony. It completely ignores Kavanaugh’s demonstrably false testimony to the committee, even during her own brief interview of the nominee.

The hearing — called by Grassley to allow Ford to tell her story and for Kavanuagh to respond — excluded testimony from at least two other women who have come forward with similar stories of sexual assaults by Kavanaugh. None of the people named by Ford as witnesses were brought to testify. Mitchell even acknowledged in her memorandum that there is “no clear standard of proof for allegations made during the Senate’s confirmation process.”  But that this not stop her from weighing in on what she termed a case that was “even weaker” than a “he said, she said.”

A recent assessment by RAINN (Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network) found that out of every 1000 rapes in American, 994 perpetrators walk free. Of the 310 of those reported to the police, just 57 will result in an arrest and just 11 will even get referred for prosecution. With prosecutors like Mitchell willing to make a determination based on just Thursday’s Judiciary Committee farce, that should come as no surprise.