Re: the FBI "investigation" and the issue of it somehow clearing Judge Kavanaugh: it's easy to not find what you don't look for.
So the FBI talked to something like 5 or 7 additional people as a response to the testimony the previous week from Dr. Blasey Ford and Judge Kavanaugh. They did not interview Dr. Blasey Ford. They did not re-interview Judge Kavanaugh about these allegations which were not known nor part of the initial background check.
They did interview the second woman who accused Judge Kavanaugh of sexual misconduct, Deborah Ramirez. However they did not contact nor interview the people whose names were provided to them by Ms. Ramirez as being able to corroborate parts of her account. They did not contact nor interview the people whose names were supplied by Dr. Blasey Ford as corroborating witnesses. Even when people on those lists contacted the FBI directly or wrote in an attempt to provide their testimony, they were never contacted, never interviewed and their accounts are not part of the report.
Former classmates of Judge Kavanaugh who attempted to contact the FBI to describe how Judge Kavanaugh perjured himself, or was at best very misleading, in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee were likewise ignored. There was no investigation into Judge Kavanaugh's assertion, made under oath, that the first he heard about the Ramirez allegation was when it was published in The New Yorker in late September, even though records show he and members of his team were texting friends and acquaintances to try to get them to coordinate stories to discredit her account as early as July. None of that was investigated or included in the report.
Yet conservative news outlets and Republicans are proclaiming loudly that the report exonerates Judge Kavanaugh. The "concerned" Senators such as Jeff Flake of Arizona or Susan Collins of Maine have been given just a big enough fig leaf to cover themselves publicly and state they are satisfied with the thoroughness of the investigation. And since (surprise and shock!) there is no corroborating evidence to be found in the report, it's on to the voting on the nomination.
In normal times the red flags and issues around Judge Kavanaugh would have caused the nomination to be pulled no matter which party was in the White House and which party controlled the Senate. Even before the sexual assault allegations there have been questions and evidence around Judge Kavanaugh's temperament, hyper partisanship, potential perjury before Congress in 2006 when nominated for the appellate court seat he currently holds, and questions around his personal finances and how he quickly paid off staggering debt on a Judge's salary that also went uninvestigated.
But these aren't normal times.
After all, it's not like this is the only conservative judge out there who would largely vote with the other conservative members of the Court to overturn or weaken Roe v Wade, to enhance corporate power and weaken unions and the government or anything that might possibly check or restrain corporate power.
But I think they stuck with Judge Kavanaugh for two reasons. One, he was Trump's guy, presumably because of his conversion to the opinion that not only can a sitting President not be indicted for a crime, he or she can't even be investigated for a crime while in office. Judge Kavanaugh came to that opinion later in life since he worked in the special counsel office under Ken Starr and certainly believed President Clinton could be investigated and subpoenaed for all sorts of activities. But hey, people grow, you know?
And I think the second reason is just power. Trump likes to win. And the GOP wants to get his nominee in whether they feel privately it was a good choice or not. To them at this point I don't think it matters. They want to get Kavanaugh confirmed because he is "their" nominee. The impact on the integrity of the Court crosses very few minds.
And so here we are. Mocking women who come forward with reports of sexual assault, putting on a sham investigation to show "we listened, we tried" for those still pretending to have standards for the Court, and locking in a far right partisan majority on the Court that will not have the trust or confidence of a vast majority of Americans.
Meanwhile an article hit the news just a couple of days ago showing the President has been committing major tax fraud, etc for decades, and it has already disappeared from the news cycles.
And the media, such as Chuck Todd, continue to blame both sides for the tribalism of our politics.
America 2018.