Screwed themselves while trying to be dicks..

GOP senators: Outside Ford questioner was a mistake

By JOHN BRESNAHAN, RACHAEL BADE and JOSH GERSTEIN

Senate Republicans are second-guessing the decision to bring in a female prosecutor to question Christine Blasey Ford — as well as the format for questioning the witness — believing the move may have backfired on them.

Ford’s riveting opening statement and poise in answering dozens of seemingly minor questions from Rachel Mitchell — a sex crimes prosecutor brought in for this hearing because there are no female Republican senators on the Senate Judiciary Committee — have put Republicans on the defensive over the sexual abuse allegations against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.

The 5-minute rounds were an ask from Ford's legal team that not every Democrat was comfortable with initially. Yet Mitchell’s inability to keep following a line of questioning without interruption, as she would do in a courtroom, clearly helped Ford and frustrated Republicans.

"I haven’t seen the whole thing but I wish our counsel had a longer period of time rather than breaking it up into five minute segments,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). “It’s just chopped up [so] you don’t have … a really good fact-finding type of exchange. That’s been unfortunate.”

During a lunch break a little over halfway through Ford’s testimony, some Senate Republicans expressed concern on the chamber floor over where Mitchell was going with her questioning, according to a GOP senator present for the exchange. They were told that Mitchell was not trying to score points against Ford, but that she would put together a case that Republicans could lay out during the committee vote on Kavanaugh Friday.

The No. 2 Senate Republican, Majority Whip John Cornyn (Texas), said Mitchell is “doing very well,” credited her with asking "respectful questions and [getting] pertinent information." But Cornyn acknowledged that the questioning was “a little awkward with five-minute rounds.”

“It’s not great,” Cornyn said of the format. “It would be better if we could develop the evidence and continue the questioning.

Towards the end of the questioning, it became clear Mitchell was chafing at her predicament. She asked Ford if she knew about the ideal way to interview trauma victims.

“Would you believe me if I told you that there’s no study that says this setting, in five-minute increments, is the best way to do that?” Mitchell asked, prompting laughter from Ford and many in the room.

“We’ll stipulate to that,” one Ford’s lawyers, Michael Bromwich, replied.

Moments later Mitchell raised the time limits again.

“Instead of submitting to an interview in California, we’re having a hearing here today—in five-minute increments,” the prosecutor said.

The negative reviews down at the other end of Pennsylvania Ave. were far more blunt, with one administration official calling the hearing a “disaster” for Kavanaugh’s confirmation hopes. The official said Republican lawmakers made a mistake by hiring a woman out of fear of the optics of Ford being questioned by an unbroken line of old white men.

Trump allies who want to see Kavanaugh confirmed were concerned that Mitchell had not managed to poke any holes in Ford's account or character that would make her story less believable. But during the Judiciary Committee’s lunch break, they were still holding out hope that her lines of questions would lead to a breakthrough finale.

“Rachel Mitchell not only is not laying a glove on her, but, in my view, is actually helping her credibility by the gentility with which these questions are being asked and the open-ended answers that the witness is being permitted to give” Trump ally and former Judge Andrew Napolitano said on Fox News. “The president cannot be happy with this.”

Some former prosecutors and outside lawyers concurred.

“I think the committee members have put Rachel Mitchell at a significant disadvantage by forcing her to conduct such a disjointed examination. She is unable to complete a line of questioning before her time expires,” said former U.S. Attorney Barbara McQuade.

The Federalist Society distributed talking points defending Mitchell's line of questioning, noting that she had been able to show that “whoever drove [Ford] home doesn't exist," according to a person who received the talking points. The Federalist Society also noted that Mitchell had managed to prove that "there was no witness to support what she's alleging happened."

During the first half of the day, Mitchell steered clear of giving Ford more opportunities to describe the details of the assault she claims was perpetrated in an upstairs bedroom of a house by Kavanaugh and his friend, Matt Judge, in the early 1980s.

But Mitchell pursued some seemingly trivial rounds of questioning that didn’t elicit any information to undermine her testimony. Mitchell and Ford had a lengthy exchange over Ford’s fear of flying, although they established that Ford often flew for her job as a psychologist and to attend family events.

Mitchell clearly suffered from the fact that neither the committee nor the FBI had questioned Ford previously, which left Mitchell probing a lot of dry holes and sometimes drawing answers that were unhelpful to the GOP side.

A question about why a polygraph was done in a hotel near an airport led to the sympathetic and probably unexpected answer from Ford that she was attending her grandmother’s funeral. Some of Mitchell’s precious time was used to question Ford about her fear of flying and to ask if she’d been to Australia, which she said she had not.

“She was out of her element,” said one defense attorney who knows Mitchell and asked not to be named. “Usually, she coddles the putative victim and excoriates the defendant and his witnesses. Her job for SJC Republicans is exactly opposite. And she has no second chair and staff with her at her table. Recipe for looking bad.”

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) argued that “the prosecutor is bolstering her credibility.”

“They’re nitpicking,” the Connecticut Democrat asserted. “Why did she cry in one place and not another? Irrelevant!”

He added: “There’s an old saying, as an old prosecutor I learned it well: Don’t ask a question if you don’t know the answer. And she has no idea what the answer will be.”