“Here’s the Truth About Brett Kavanaugh’s Finances”

From Mother Jones, by Stephanie Mencimer, who has been covering this issue since 2018 (Hat tip to Howard Bashman at How Appealing):

It’s become a predictable pattern: The Supreme Court issues a controversial ruling on a hot-button social issue, and then Justice Brett Kavanaugh trends on Twitter. Earlier this month, it happened again after the court refused to block the recent Texas law that all but bans abortion. Almost immediately, hashtags like #WhoOwnsKavanaugh and #BrettsDebts blossomed across social media. The tweets are driven by frustrated liberals who continue to believe that the Trump-appointed justice has been bought off by a secret, deep-pocketed benefactor who has allowed him to live well above his judicial salary.

The frenzy is not merely predicated on the antipathy liberals have for this particular conservative justice, but on to the fragile hope that it might lead to ousting him from his lifetime appointment….

The idea that Brett Kavanaugh has taken bribes to sustain his country club lifestyle is one of the hardiest conspiracy theories on the political left. And like most conspiracy theories, this one suffers from some internal logic problems. Yet lots of otherwise smart people who see conspiracy theories as solely a scourge of the right seem to believe it, in part because, as with so many such myths, the Kavanaugh conspiracy theory originated with a few facts.

The vanishing debts, and their size, raised enough suspicion that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) even asked Kavanaugh in written follow-up questions whether he might have a gambling problem. (He said no.) Further concerns involved the purchase of his tony Chevy Chase, Md., house in 2006 for $1.225 million. How did Kavanaugh come up with a $245,000 down payment at a time when his financial disclosure forms indicated that he had a mere $10,000 in the bank outside of his federal retirement account?

As it turned out, there were rather simple answers to most of those questions. Kavanaugh explained to the Senate Judiciary Committee that much of his credit card debt stemmed from either work on his fixer-upper mansion or buying Nats season and playoff tickets for himself and a handful of dudes who’d been going to the games together for years. They had paid him back in full, the White House said at the time. As for the rest, while he was maddeningly obtuse in admitting it, Kavanaugh seems to have gotten lots of money from his parents.

As I explained back in 2018, gifts from family don’t have to be reported on federal judicial disclosure forms, and Kavanaugh’s family had deep pockets. He’s the only child of a “swamp creature,” Ed Kavanaugh, a longtime lobbyist for the cosmetics industry who spent his career schmoozing with Beltway insiders to fend off health and safety regulations and dueling with activists who wanted to ban cosmetic testing on animals. When the elder Kavanaugh retired in 2005, his compensation package that year from the Cosmetic, Toiletry and Fragrance Association totaled $13 million, according to the nonprofit group’s IRS filing….

Meanwhile, the current Twitter bounty for a successful investigation into Kavanaugh’s finances continues to grow. Cooper says he’s up to $85,000 from luminaries offering to chip in, and he’s been urged to start a Go Fund Me he estimates could rake in $250,000. He doesn’t want to create a fund, but he does hope his original offer will kickstart an investigation by journalists into Kavanaugh’s debts. I told to him that such an investigation would likely turn up exactly what I discovered three years ago. But like so many liberals I’ve explained this to, Cooper wasn’t convinced. He’s suspicious as to why Kavanaugh hasn’t just come out and admitted that his parents helped him financially.

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