The Education of Brett Kavanaugh by Robin Pogrebin & Kate Kelly

Author:Robin Pogrebin & Kate Kelly
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-09-16T16:00:00+00:00

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Buckling her seat belt, Ford was palpably nervous, given her long-standing fear of planes and other confined spaces. “I’m not going in front of the Judiciary Committee,” she repeatedly told her friends. “I’m just meeting with people individually.”

Jay Backstrand, the private wealth manager, attempted some humor. “Can I have a Bloody Mary?” he asked the flight attendant. But there was no alcohol available on board, only breakfast.

The plane landed at Dulles International Airport around 2:30 in the afternoon, earlier than expected. That meant Ford, already leery of being spotted (concealing her face in a baseball cap and sunglasses), had to linger in the private-plane hangar until the group’s ride arrived. Eventually she and her friends were picked up by a security team in black SUVs.

They were driven to the Watergate Hotel, where they compared notes about whose room had a view of the site of the infamous 1972 break-in. In a small conference room off the hotel’s main lobby, guarded by a hulking pair of security guards who had been hired to protect her while traveling, Ford met with her lawyers. In addition to Katz and Banks, that legal team now included Bromwich, who had joined just days before to aid with the congressional testimony, and Larry Robbins, the Washington litigator who had been one of the first to connect with Ford.

The group tried to put Ford at ease with small talk. Since she seemed emotionally drained, they kept the meeting short.

Given the ongoing discussions with Mike Davis and others on the majority staff, the lawyers understood Ford’s uncertainty about whether she would meet with senators individually in a closed setting or testify to the full committee in public. “There was always the question of open or closed hearing,” Banks said later, adding of Ford that “the committee had given her the option, so that had been a conversation throughout, about what was the better way to do that for her.”

For Banks and her colleagues, who had been immersed in advising Ford during the week before the Watergate meeting, the public glare had also been intense. They, too, had received death threats in the wake of the Washington Post story, some of them misogynistic, detailed, and disturbing. Some of those directed at Katz were also anti-Semitic, she said; some had sexually violent language. “It was scary,” she said. Like Ford, the lawyers quickly retained bodyguards who monitored them day and night.

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