Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) dodged questions Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union about whether or not she would prosecute Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh over the multiple sexual-assault allegations he is facing.
Klobuchar, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, made headlines last week during her questioning of Kavanaugh when she asked him if he had ever blacked out while drinking in high school. Before her career in politics, however, Klobuchar herself served as a prosecutor in her role as Hennepin County attorney, which host Jake Tapper brought up Sunday.
Tapper began his questioning by noting that there is currently “no corroborating evidence from the time” of the alleged assault, and that the “prosecutor that the Republicans brought in has said that she would not have enough to take this case to even get a search warrant.”
“Do you disagree with that assessment as a former prosecutor?” Tapper asked Klobuchar, but she instead discussed Kavanaugh’s views of executive power and criticized President Donald Trump for undermining the FBI.
“This wasn’t a criminal trial; this is a job interview. So many of us have already decided because of this nominee’s expansive view of presidential power that he doesn’t belong on this court to be handpicked by a president who has continually undermined the FBI,” she responded, adding that she hasn’t “looked at the evidence in that way.”
“But what I did find was that she seemed very compelling, she answered the questions with grace and dignity,” she continued, saying last week’s testimonies were “about the dignity of the court.”
In her memo to the Senate Judiciary Committee, prosecutor Rachel Mitchell, who questioned Kavanaugh and accuser Christine Blasey Ford during last week’s hearings, wrote that a “he said, she said” case “is incredibly difficult to prove,” but “this case is even weaker than that.”
“For the reasons discussed below, I do not think that a reasonable prosecutor would bring this case based on the evidence before the committee,” she continued. “Nor do I believe that this evidence is sufficient to satisfy the preponderance-of-the-evidence standard.”
In a recent New York Times poll, just 33 percent of Minnesota voters said they “believe” the accusations made against Kavanaugh, compared to 24 percent who “do not believe” the accusations and 43 percent who said they “don’t know.”
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Anthony Gockowski is managing editor of The Minnesota Sun. Follow Anthony on Twitter. Email tips to [email protected].
