A press adviser helping lead the Senate Judiciary Committee’s response to a sexual assault allegation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has stepped down amid evidence he was fired from a previous political job in part because of a sexual harassment allegation against him.
Garrett Ventry, 29, who served as a communications aide to the committee chaired by Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, had been helping coordinate the majority party's messaging in the wake of Christine Blasey Ford’s claim that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her 36 years ago at a high school party. In a response to NBC News, Ventry denied any past "allegations of misconduct."
After NBC News raised questions about Ventry's employment history and the sexual harassment allegation against him, Judiciary Committee Spokesman Taylor Foy replied in a statement: "While (Ventry) strongly denies allegations of wrongdoing, he decided to resign to avoid causing any distraction from the work of the committee."
Republicans familiar with the situation had been concerned that Ventry, because of his history, could not lead an effective communications response.
Ventry worked as a social media adviser in 2017 in the office of North Carolina House Majority Leader John Bell, who fired Ventry after several months.
“Mr. Ventry did work in my office and he’s no longer there, he moved on,” Bell told NBC News. He refused to discuss the precise nature of the firing.
Ventry did not answer questions about the circumstances of his departure but said, "I deny allegations of misconduct." He also forwarded a letter of resignation he said he sent to Bell, giving two weeks notice. "Thank you for the opportunity to serve on the staff of the North Carolina House Majority leader at the North Carolina General Assembly," it read.
Sources familiar with the situation said Ventry was let go from Bell’s office after parts of his résumé were found to have been embellished, and because he faced an accusation of sexual harassment from a female employee of the North Carolina General Assembly's Republican staff.
Ventry’s termination was described to NBC News as unusually swift for an office with little overall turnover.
Hard to defend the Supreme Court nominee accused of sexual harassment when your media response team is led by a guy accused of sexual harassment. Or hey, maybe he has relevant experience!
Of course, the main issue is now it's blinding obvious that the GOP is leading a coordinated effort to destroy Dr. Christine Blasey-Ford's life, and right-wing noisemaker Ed Whelen has all but given the game away.
Yesterday, Whelan, the president of the Ethics and & Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank, and an assertive supporter of Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court, took to Twitter to lay out a Hardy Boys-inspired scenario, suggesting that Christine Blasey Ford, the woman who accused Kavanaugh of attempted rape in high school, might have been mistaken about the identity of her alleged sexual assaulter. Using a mash-up of yearbook photos, Zillow information, Google Maps and Facebook, Whelan laid out a “case” that another man, a former classmate of Kavanaugh’s at Georgetown Prep—whom he named and provided a current photograph of—might have been the person Ford has in mind. After his wild theory received widespread criticism, Whelan deleted the tweets, and tried to walk back the accusation this morning.
But, if it’s false, it’s already too late to protect him against a possible defamation claim.
The common law of defamation isn’t that complicated. To be liable, the defendant must make an intentionally or negligently false statement about the plaintiff that tends to cause reputational harm, and harm must actually ensue.
The requirement that the statements Whelan made about the “mystery man” (whom we’ll not re-identify here) be false might be the most difficult requirement to satisfy. The first question courts ask is whether a reasonable person would think that the defendant was saying something that would be taken as the truth—because a statement can only be “false” if compared to a true one. Generally, opinions are not actionable, if the defendant sets forth the basis for them and doesn’t claim them to be true. Whelan might argue that he himself was publishing an opinion, as one of the last tweets in the storm has this disclaimer: “I have no idea what, if anything, did or did not happen in that bedroom at the top of the stairs.”
But that may not be enough to insulate Whelan, given that he also wrote of “compelling reasons to believe” Kavanaugh’s denial, and then launched into a Twitterstorm examination of what he clearly presents as evidence in support of his “theory.” A reasonable person might well think he was making a claim about what “really” happened. The case he builds reads much more like a series of factual, evidence-based claims than an opinion. The mystery man, though, will have the burden of proving that the statement Whelan made was false, and would be reasonably taken that way.
Whelan retracted everything, but it turns out he was pushed by a GOP PR firm into running with the accusations, the same group behind the now infamous Swift Boat accusations against John Kerry.
The larger problem for Kavanaugh though is that it's looking more and more like both the nominee and the White House knew full well what Whelan was up to, meaning they were in on the smear from the start. If that's the case, then I don't see how Kavanaugh survives.
Hell, it's getting so bad for the GOP that they can't help themselves and have already created this year's Todd Akin moment.
Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-ND), the GOP Senate nominee, said Friday that giving credence to allegations that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted a young woman when they were teenagers is “absurd.”
Cramer sounded off on professor Christine Blasey Ford’s claim that Brett Kavanaugh drunkenly sexually assaulted her when she was 15 and he was 17 during a radio interview, describing them as “even more absurd” than Anita Hill’s accusations that Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas had sexually harassed her because of Kavanaugh’s age at the time and because it was “an attempt or something that never went anywhere.”
“This case is even more absurd because these people were teenagers when this supposed, alleged incident took place. Teenagers. Not a boss, supervisor-subordinate situation as the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill situation was claimed to be,” he said during an appearance on KNOX. “These are teenagers who evidently were drunk according to her own, her own statements. They were drunk when it evidently happened… even by her own accusation. Again, it was supposedly an attempt or something that never went anywhere. So you just have to wonder.”
Congratulations to Heidi Heitkamp for having this dirt clod as an opponent, because she just won re-election.
Everything that the GOP could possibly be doing to drive the massive gender gap higher and to lose women for a generation is happening.
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