Courtesy of Pam Martens
An Angry and Belligerent Brett Kavanaugh Testifies Before the Senate Judiciary Committee on September 27, 2018. Multiple Former Yale Classmates Say He Perjured Himself.
Editor’s Note: On June 18, 1991, when I was managing money for individual clients at a Wall Street firm, a client told me that Bernie Madoff had been guaranteeing him, and other members of his Long Island country club, 13 percent annual returns on the stock portfolios Madoff managed for them – and had been delivering those returns for about 15 years. It was then, as it is today, a serious violation to promise guaranteed returns on a stock portfolio for the obvious reason that markets can experience serious losses within any one year and negative returns in multiple years. I told my client this and suggested that a person willing to ignore a well known prohibition against promising investors guaranteed stock returns is highly likely to be lying about bigger things. I suggested to this client that Madoff was likely running a Ponzi scheme and strongly urged him to get his money away from Madoff and warn his fellow country club members. At the time, I had no idea that Madoff was scamming more than just members of this one country club. After Madoff confessed to his sons and they turned him in to the FBI in 2008, his international Ponzi scheme became a national scandal which has tarnished the reputation of the SEC to this day. The public learned that Harry Markopolos, a financial expert, had been sending detailed written reports to the SEC for years (in 2000, 2001, 2005, 2007 and 2008), making the case that Madoff was running a Ponzi scheme. The SEC ignored those repeated credible warnings — likely because Madoff was an important man on Wall Street by then. (See our report here on how SEC lawyers who tried to take on powerful men or firms on Wall Street were sidelined or fired by the SEC.)
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The print edition of today’s New York Times carries an OpEd by former FBI Director James Comey on Brett Kavanaugh, whose nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court is under a growing cloud of uncertainty. One particular sentence in Comey’s opinion piece caught our eye. It speaks to how trained FBI agents will look at the obvious lies Kavanaugh told the Senate Judiciary Committee about what he had written in his yearbook, where he falsely claimed obvious sexual remarks meant something else. Comey said FBI agents “know that little lies point to bigger lies. They know that obvious lies by the nominee about the meaning of words in a yearbook are a flashing signal to dig deeper.”
Americans should not take Comey’s word that the FBI will, in fact, dig deeper. The FBI has had six previous opportunities to “dig deeper” when it conducted background checks on Kavanaugh and it did not do so.
Multiple mainstream media outlets reported over the weekend that the scope of the new FBI investigation into Kavanaugh has been restricted by Senate Republicans working with Don McGahn, the White House Counsel, who is the same man who has spearheaded Kavanaugh’s nomination this far. According to those reports, the FBI has a limited witness list it is allowed to contact and that doesn’t include Julie Swetnick, a woman who has signed a sworn affidavit that was submitted to the Senate Judiciary Committee accusing Kavanaugh, and his friend, Mark Judge, of aiding and abetting the gang rape of women in high school.
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