Mitchell then turned to the polygraph test that Ford had taken on August 7, asking how she had decided to take it. Her attorneys again objected, “You’re seeming to call for communications between counsel and client.” But Ford answered that she’d done so on the advice of attorneys, that she had no idea who paid for it, and that she had taken the polygraph on the day of her grandmother’s funeral or maybe the day after, just before a flight to New Hampshire. She could not remember many details from the August 7 polygraph.
Continuing with that subject, Mitchell asked, “Have you ever had discussions with anyone, beside your attorneys, on how to take a polygraph?” Ford: “Never.”
“Have you ever given tips or advice to somebody who was looking to take a polygraph test?” Ford replied, “Never.”
As the Judiciary Committee recessed for lunch, the media continued in the same tenor as earlier. On CNN, Jeffrey Toobin reminded viewers that Mark Judge had written a book about his notoriously drunken youth and surmised that Republicans didn’t want him to testify because he would be such a bad witness. “It just underlines how badly this has all gone for the Kavanaugh side in this hearing so far,” he said, inviting viewers to “dwell for a moment” on how “ineffective this cross-examination has been.”15 Gloria Borger noted that the procedure allowed for no defense of Kavanaugh; it would be “all on” him to repair the damage that was being done.
NBC’s Savannah Guthrie acknowledged that Mitchell had “scored some points here and there,” including the shocking admission that the woman the media had depicted as afraid to fly actually flew regularly.16 Megyn Kelly, repeating the maxim that prosecutors should never ask a question to which they do not already know the answer, was critical of Mitchell, who had “gone fishing a couple of times and come up with nothing.”17
Kelly was mistaken. Mitchell knew more than outsiders realized, and the committee staff could see what she had caught. The question about polygraph coaching might have looked like a fishing expedition, but investigators had already talked to a witness—a former boyfriend of Ford’s—who said she had coached a friend preparing to submit to a polygraph test. If that witness was telling the truth, Ford had just lied under oath. Interestingly enough, the woman he had identified as the recipient of the coaching—Monica McLean—was not only in the hearing room but had walked in from the holding area with Ford and her attorneys.
Still, Kelly said, “There has been no Perry Mason moment.”18
Outside observers were convinced that the day was already a disaster for Kavanaugh. Steve Schmidt, an advisor to Republicans such as George W. Bush and John McCain, said, “Every GOP campaign strategist and Hill staffer wishes they had the button to open the trap door under Rachel Mitchell’s chair. What a total and complete political disaster for Republicans.”19
Media analysts were dazzled by Ford’s professional explanations of how memory works. When Senator Feinstein asked her how she could be so sure it was Kavanaugh who attacked her, she answered, “The same way that I’m sure that I’m talking to you right now. Just basic memory functions and also just the level of norepinephrine and the epinephrine in the brain that, as you know, encodes that neurotransmitter that codes memories into the hippocampus, and so the trauma-related experience is locked there, whereas other details kind of drift.” When Senator Leahy asked what her strongest memory was, she replied, “Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter, the uproarious laughter between the two, and they’re having fun at my expense.”
Ford’s displays of professional expertise alternated with expressions of childlike ignorance. In her opening statement, she professed that she had not known how to reach her senator, so she had called her representative’s office and the Washington Post instead. In response to a question from Senator Whitehouse, she said she didn’t know what “exculpatory” meant. He explained it referred to evidence helpful to the accused.
No matter what Ford said, the media lapped it up. Mimi Rocah, a legal analyst for MSNBC, observed that trial lawyers usually supplement the victim’s testimony with that of experts who can expand on the victim’s statements and explain any gaps in memory. But Ford, she said, was “everything bottled up in one. She’s really good at both [roles].” Rocah hoped that Mark Judge, who had previously said, under penalty of felony, that he had no memory of Kavanaugh’s acting the way Ford described, would “have a moment of conscience where he needs to tell the truth.”20
A former U.S. attorney, Joyce Vance, confident of Kavanaugh’s guilt, agreed. Judge needed to testify under oath—presumably because his previous statement, which was subject to the same penalty as perjury, was somehow less reliable. If he were to testify, she wondered, “Does he go ahead and confirm his friend’s version of events? Or does he finally complete the outreach that Dr. Ford tried to make with him during this event, where she says she locked eyes with him and thought he might help her. You know, will he finally, from across the years, come forth and tell the story and achieve some kind of redemption for what he did?”21
The Republican consultant Schmidt seemed to be in agony, tweeting: “The GOP members are putting on a clinic for political cowardice. Will not one of them, while watching a hectoring and minimally prepared Rachel Mitchell harass Dr. Ford, step up and take back their time and denounce this kangaroo court?”22 The absurdity of this characterization of Mitchell’s questioning was best demonstrated, fittingly enough, by a Saturday Night Live parody two nights later, in which a mild-mannered Mitchell is repeatedly cut off in the middle of a lengthy and methodically worded sentence by the expiration of her five minutes.23 The predominant criticism of Mitchell, especially from the right, was that she was too deferential to Ford and that her questioning was meandering and unfocused.
In the next round of questions, Ford’s lawyers admitted that they had paid for the polygraph. When Ford was asked who helped her work with Senate offices, she seemed confused. She did admit that Feinstein had recommended that she work with Debra Katz’s law firm.
It was no surprise that Feinstein’s office would recommend Katz. She had been considered one of the best litigators of sexual harassment claims for decades. But they also knew that Katz, a longtime Democratic donor and fundraiser, would be on their team politically. She represented the Feminist Majority Foundation—another beneficiary of the Arabella dark-money empire.24 And her feelings about the Trump administration were less than sympathetic: “These people are all miscreants,” she fumed on Facebook in March 2017. “The term ‘basket of deplorables’ is far too generous a description for these people who are now Senior Trump advisors.”25 Katz was the perfect person for the job.
Mitchell asked whether Leland Keyser had ever asked Ford why she had left the party so suddenly. She said she had not. Keyser, of course, had already said that she had no recollection of the party Ford described. Ford now suggested that Keyser’s denial was tied to “significant health challenges,” adding that she was “happy that she’s focusing on herself and getting the health treatment that she needs.” It was true that Keyser had health problems, but the remark was widely interpreted, including by some close to Keyser, as disparaging.26