NBC News had information as early as Sept. 30 showing that celebrity lawyer Michael Avenatti and his client Julie Swetnick, who alleges she witnessed Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh participating in multiple gang rapes when he was 15, may have been engaged in a disgraceful fraud to destroy the judge. Yet, NBC said nothing about it until Oct. 25.
On Thursday, NBC published a report titled, “ New questions raised about Avenatti claims regarding Kavanaugh.” The article ticks through several already-identified discrepancies in Swetnick’s story. More importantly, however, the report includes new details about additional inconsistencies in a statement from a second woman presented by Avenatti as a corroborating witness.
Avenatti connected the second woman to NBC for a phone interview on Sept. 30. During that call, the woman claimed she never witnessed Kavanaugh engaging in the behavior described by Swetnick. The woman also said she wasn’t even friends with the alleged victim during the time of the supposed abuse.
Later, on Oct. 2, Avenatti published a sworn declaration bearing the second woman’s name, claiming she witnessed Kavanaugh’s attempts to drug and sexually abuse vulnerable partygoers. That same day, NBC aired an exclusive one-on-one interview with Swetnick. The interviewer, Kate Snow, prefaced and concluded the interview by noting they couldn’t verify a single thing in the alleged victim’s story and that she made statements in the interview inconsistent with her affidavit.
That alone should have been reason enough to kill the interview, but NBC aired it anyway.
Now, we learn that the supposedly corroborating witness told NBC on Oct. 3 that she only “skimmed” the declaration published online by Avenatti. She then told NBC in a text message dated Oct. 4 that she never saw Kavanaugh “spike the punch. I didn’t see anyone spike the punch … I was very clear with Michael Avenatti from day one.”
Avenatti confirmed for NBC that the same woman who said she never saw the behavior described by Swetnick is the same woman he presented to the network for a Sept. 30 phone call. When NBC pressed Avenatti to explain the discrepancies, he deflected, stating that he was “disgusted” with the network.
NBC also reported that “in an apparent effort to thwart the reporting process, he added in the phone call, ‘How about this, on background, it’s not the same woman. What are you going to do with that?’”
Avenatti reportedly said in a separate conversation with the network that he had “confirmed with her yet again that everything in the declaration is true and correct. She must have been confused by your question.”
NBC then reported:
Roughly five minutes later, the woman sent a formally-worded text backing Avenatti. “Please understand that everything in the declaration is true and you should not contact me anymore regarding this issue,” the text read.
But when reached by phone minutes later, the woman again insisted that she never saw Kavanaugh spike punch or act inappropriately toward women. She said she’s “been consistent in what she’s told Michael.”
In a subsequent text on Oct. 5, she wrote, “I will definitely talk to you again and no longer Avenatti. I do not like that he twisted my words.”
Just so we’re all on the same page: NBC became aware before the Oct. 6 Senate confirmation vote of additional inconsistencies and discrepancies in a sexual misconduct allegation that it had given airtime to on national television. The network even experienced what it describes as an attempt by the woman’s attorney to “thwart” the reporting process.
And yet, NBC said nothing about any of this until this week.
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The Senate Judiciary Committee announced Thursday that it had referred both Avenatti and Swetnick to the Justice Department for criminal investigation. The committee is interested most in pursuing allegations that Avenatti and his client provided false statements and obstructed congressional investigations.
As the investigation will undoubtedly turn up all conversations between Avenatti and NBC, the network is trying to get ahead of the public learning the full extent of just how stupid it was for them to take the Swetnick story seriously. I keep thinking we’ve hit bottom with NBC’s outrageous and irresponsible coverage of the Kavanaugh allegations, and the network keeps proving me wrong.
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NBC sat on evidence exonerating Justice Kavanaugh, discrediting Michael Avenatti and his clients' accusations https://t.co/WXzSeQqBz7
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) October 26, 2018
The media always has an agenda. In this case, the agenda was to destroy Justice Kavanaugh personally and professionally to prevent him from becoming a Supreme Court justice. So the media’s job was to report every claim of Justice Kavanaugh’s allegedly improper behavior as the gospel truth. After all, they and their partners in this scheme still believed the average person still trusts the media to report the truth as they did back in the Walter Cronkite/Huntley/Brinkley era and will accept anything these media outlets say. Hey, the scheme worked against Roy Moore and years before that, with Herman Cain. Why wouldn’t it work again?
Unfortunately, the audience was a lot smarter than the media and their handlers thought. Coupled with lazy lump Republicans who suddenly grew a spine, the scheme backfired. I expect that NBC and most of the rest of the media which engaged in such obviously hostile, biased reporting were not prepared for the backlash that followed. So now NBC is doing its dance trying to hold onto what integrity it has left. Alas for NBC, its audience won’t buy any excuses or explanations.
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