In its now-corrected “bombshell” article, the New York Times over the weekend claimed to have identified yet another witness to Justice Brett Kavanaugh’s alleged sexual deviancy in college. Reporters Kate Kelly and Robin Pogrebin touted a “previously unreported story” sourced by a Yale classmate of Kavanaugh’s who said he saw, “Kavanaugh with his pants down at a different drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.”
Pogrebin and Kelly have authored a new book on Kavanaugh, which is scheduled to be released this week.
The Times story originally failed to note that the alleged victim cannot recall the incident and the account only relied on the word of Kavanaugh’s classmate, Max Stier.
In their story, the reporters only describe Stier as someone who “runs a nonprofit in Washington.” Pundits and journalists quickly lined up to vouch for Stier’s solid reputation: “Max Stier is a very credible and highly respected person,” tweeted longtime Democratic consultant David Axelrod.
But it’s likely Axelrod is a tad biased since Stier is tied to the Clintons. According to weekend reporting by The Federalist, Stier served on President Bill Clinton’s legal team during his impeachment proceedings. Kavanaugh was on the opposite side of that battle as part of Independent Counsel Ken Starr’s team. Stier also has worked with David Kendall, Hillary Clinton’s attorney.
Stier, a “management expert,” also has been a frequent critic of President Trump. After the election, his nonprofit partnered with the Washington Post on a new initiative to track Trump’s appointments. He has since been quoted extensively in the paper speaking unfavorably about Trump and his administration.
Just two months after President Trump was sworn in, Stier published an op-ed in Politico that accused the president of “winging it” on federal appointments. “When confronted recently with this track record, the president characteristically went on the attack, arguing that many of these jobs are unnecessary and declaring that he does not plan to fill them,” Stier wrote in March 2017.
Stier blasted Trump in October 2017 for having too many white men in his cabinet and for lacking a “direct sense prioritized diversity.” Trump’s mockery of the deep state, according to Stier, is unwarranted and dangerous.
“There’s no question that it not only demeans the value of public service, but undermines the trust the public has in public institutions,” Stier told U.S. News in March 2018. “Those are all bad for democracy.”
In Stier’s view, Trump’s attacks on a bloated federal bureaucracy are unfair because “most federal employees are dedicated and do extraordinary work on behalf of the public.”
These are just a few of Stier’s recent comments about the president. So the Times’ vanilla description of Stier as an unbiased nonprofit chief was just one more distortion in its deeply dishonest hit piece on Kavanaugh.