Mitchell ended her questioning with an expression of admiration at how well-educated Ford was about the neurological effects of trauma, and she wondered if she knew the best way to plumb the memory and get to the truth when interviewing trauma victims. It was not, Mitchell noted, an interview cut up into five-minute increments, but a sustained interview with a trained questioner in a private setting—a technique called a “cognitive interview.” “This is not a cognitive interview. Did anybody ever advise you from Senator Feinstein’s office, or from Representative Eshoo’s office to go get a forensic interview?” Mitchell asked. No one had, said Ford. “Instead, you were advised to get an attorney and take a polygraph, is that right?” Mitchell asked. “And instead of submitting to an interview in California, we’re having a hearing here today in five-minute increments. Is that right?”
Mitchell referred to an article about the use of the cognitive interview, a technique that is considered effective at eliciting accurate statements. It is also useful for questioning subjects whose veracity is in question. Studies have shown that, properly conducted, cognitive interviews can distinguish between honest and deceptive witnesses with more than 80 percent accuracy.27 If the senators on the Judiciary Committee had truly been interested in determining whether Christine Blasey Ford was telling the truth, they could have done so more reliably in a private interview that also would have satisfied her professed concerns about privacy and convenience.
Instead, Mitchell was unable to ask Ford to give an uninterrupted narrative, to repeat it chronologically and in reverse, or to make a drawing of the scene. But she did employ several important features of the cognitive interview. For instance, she established rapport at the beginning by allowing the witness to offer an extended version of her story, only later going back to clarify inconsistencies. She presented her questions in collaborative terms, asking the subject to help her understand. She confronted Ford about inconsistencies in a piecemeal fashion, avoiding an opportunity for her to come up with a single comprehensive explanation for all her inconsistencies, as witnesses often do when they are lying. Mitchell had uncovered a number of problems with Ford’s testimony, but she had done so in such a gentle way that it was not clear that Ford had recognized what was happening.
The media certainly didn’t pick up on what Mitchell had revealed. The incomprehension that Cynthia Alksne of MSBNC revealed was typical: “You build a cross-exam to a crescendo and you spend hours planning it and you’ve had this witness for a lot of time. I’ve never seen a worse crescendo in my whole life. I mean, that was awful. To end on that. I mean, it was mind boggling that’s the way it ended about ‘this is five minutes’ or ‘you should have been in L.A.’ or ‘why weren’t you here?’ It didn’t even go out with a whimper. It went out with a simmer. I mean, I don’t even know what that was. That’s the worst cross-exam I’ve ever seen. Am I wrong?”28
The Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, however, were not cross-examining Ford, nor were they playing to the cable news peanut gallery. Their only concern was a very small audience—the Republican senators whose votes were in question and which they could not afford to lose—in particular, Senators Flake and Murkowski.
These senators also cared deeply about the protocols of the Senate and suspected that the Democrats were simply using Ford as a weapon against Kavanaugh. They were dismayed by the revelation that Feinstein was responsible for Ford’s being represented by the political animal Debra Katz. In fact, the performance of Ford’s attorneys during the morning’s questioning was, for these senators, the most interesting part of the morning’s hearings. Katz and Bromwich had interrupted when Ford was asked about her legal representation and tried to keep her from talking about whether she knew about repeated offers of the Senate interviewers to come to her. Grassley had made that offer to her lawyers and even repeated it on television. If Ford was to be believed, they had kept this information from her, forcing their timid client into the spotlight of a Washington hearing. Republican senators, including some who were key votes, were appalled by Ford’s attorneys. They felt that people who cared for her should have told her about the repeated offers to travel to her. And the way they flanked her and interrupted her to keep from answering questions struck them as overly controlling.
The investigators on the staff of the Judiciary Committee were shocked to learn that a polygraph test, which is generally not admissible in court and is of questionable value to begin with, had been administered while Ford was mourning her grandmother’s death and preparing for a supposedly terrifying flight. Because the polygraph measures anxiety in response to questions, polygraphers usually avoid administering it against a background of psychological distress. She seemed not to know if she had been recorded, although the state of Maryland requires consent of all parties for recording and American Polygraph Association standards require polygraphs to be recorded from beginning to end. It is typical to release the audio and video of a polygraph for second opinions, but Ford and her attorneys declined to do so.
The anti-Kavanaugh forces, then, had taken some serious blows that morning, but the damage was below the surface. The running commentary in the media coalesced around the theme of Kavanaugh’s now-inevitable defeat. The White House reporter Ashley Parker, appearing on MSNBC, declared that “by the end of the day [Trump] might be willing to cut Judge Kavanaugh loose. They don’t know. This is a moving situation but the outlook now is fairly grim.” The anchorman Brian Williams responded that Trump’s own instincts were damaging Kavanaugh’s prospects. In his “inability to read the room,” the president had reportedly encouraged the judge to be “ ‘hotter’ on camera—to ad lib more, get off his talking points.” But for Kavanaugh to come in “hotter,” after Ford’s “emotional” and “very organic” testimony, Williams warned, would be “off-balance.” “That’s such a smart point,” Parker told him. If Kavanaugh appeared “indignant, more outraged, and more defiant,” he might please the president but would not “win over the room” or the general public.29
The White House was enthralled by the testimony. Everyone was watching the proceedings on the Hill, leaving the normally bustling corridors of the West Wing oddly silent. The Kavanaugh team thought that Ford had done extremely well, and they were no longer confident that the Republican senators, a handful of whom were not conservative or were consumed by antipathy to Trump, would stick together. They were less worried about Collins than Murkowski and Flake, but they knew it would be hard for Republicans to vote for Kavanaugh unless he hit a home run that afternoon.
The situation at midday revealed the risk of their strategy of not attacking Ford’s character, even though they had information that was at odds with her testimony. The ex-boyfriend had told them about her frequent flying and her history with polygraphs. Fearing a backlash against himself, he had been reluctant to speak against Ford but had relented under the weight of an official Senate investigation.
The White House had expected Ford to perform well as a witness. While they believed Kavanaugh was innocent, many of them also believed that Ford had probably suffered an assault like the one she described and had, for whatever reason, come to believe what she was saying about Kavanaugh.