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Kavanaugh’s Yale roommate says Kavanaugh committed perjury, but Republicans don’t care

"I saw him coming home from parties unable to speak coherently."

CREDIT: SCREENGRAB
CREDIT: SCREENGRAB

On Thursday morning, one of Brett Kavanaugh’s roommates at Yale, Jamie Roche, went on CNN and said Kavanaugh committed perjury when he told the Senate Judiciary Committee he never drank so much he blacked out.

“I was Brett’s college roommate, we shared a room. We had beds 12 feet apart, and I would see him leaving to go to parties having had beers in our suite, I saw him coming home from parties unable to speak coherently,” Roche said. “I saw him when he was vomiting in the bedroom and in the bathroom in the suite, and I saw him the next morning when he couldn’t get himself out of bed. I am not a doctor, I don’t know how you define ‘blacking out,’ but like I lot of people I had some beer in college as well and I would say those things are consistent with blacking out.”

Roche went on to say he has specific memories of he and Kavanaugh having conversations in which the future judge confessed to drinking to the point where he’d say things like, “Well, I can’t really remember if I did this or did that.”

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Roche added that he also thinks Kavanaugh misled the Senate when he professed ignorance about the meanings of sexual slang terms he used during his high school and college days.

“I think what was shocking to me was getting up under oath and with a straight face saying these things were true when he knew and when a lot of people knew that that was not the case,” Roche said. “And it was a suggestion that ‘if i just say this, nobody will challenge me, nobody will stand up and take the risk of saying what we all knew to be true.'”

Roche’s testimony would be evidence that Kavanaugh committed perjury. But not only has he not been contacted by congressional investigators, but he said later in the interview that the FBI didn’t contact him as part of the bureau’s just-completed investigation of two sexual assault claims against Kavanaugh — including one that allegedly happened while Kavanaugh was drunk at a party at Yale.

The White House’s talking point is that Kavanaugh’s possible perjury about his drinking habits doesn’t matter, because he’s had a commendable career since then. Republicans seem to be on the same page.

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Despite the fact that Roche and many other key witnesses have been frozen out of the Senate and FBI investigations, key Senate Republicans indicated on Thursday morning that they’re satisfied with the FBI’s work, and indicated they’re willing to vote for Kavanaugh without Roche and other witnesses who weren’t contacted by the FBI having a chance to tell their story under oath or to investigators.

Roche’s comments are far from the only evidence that Kavanaugh committed perjury.

As ThinkProgress detailed on Wednesday, a letter Kavanaugh wrote to seven Georgetown Preparatory School classmates who joined him for a weeklong vacation at an Ocean City, Maryland condo in 1983 that was obtained by the New York Times advises his friends that “it would probably be a good idea on Sat. the 18th to warn the neighbors that we’re loud, obnoxious drunks with prolific pukers among us. Advise them to go about about 30 miles…”

That letter corroborates a book written by Kavanaugh’s friend Mark Judge about the drinking culture at Georgetown Prep in which he tells a story about a “Bart O’Kavanaugh” who drank so much that he vomited in someone’s car during Beach Week.

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Kavanaugh, however, testified under oath last month that a reference to vomiting in his yearbook merely referred to his weak stomach, not binge drinking. The letter makes that claim appear dubious at best.

During his testimony, Kavanaugh wouldn’t even admit that the “Bart O’Kavanaugh” Mark Judge wrote about was him. That claim is particularly hard to fathom in light of the fact that the letter he wrote to his friends is signed, “Bart.”