Is the Los Angeles Times’ Jackie Calmes a double agent?
She recently tweeted out a thread in support of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson. “The fact is, there is no credible allegation of sexual misconduct against Jackson as there was against [Brett] Kavanaugh,” Calmes wrote. “And to those Tweeters asking me what’s the evidence that Christine Ford was credible (as was Debbie Ramirez), I say, buy my book: ‘Dissent.’ I’m sure you’ll come away convinced!”
I can only conclude that Calmes, in fact, may be working for Kavanaugh and his supporters—including me, also dragged by the Left into that ridiculous oppo research hit. Calmes’ book is called Dissent: The Radicalization of the Republican Party and Its Capture of the Court. Its subject is Kavanaugh’s elevation to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018.
I say this because the book is so full of errors that it is hard to explain unless Calmes is a double agent hired by Republicans to make liberals look like vicious idiots.
We’ll take the errors one at a time—and keep it to a few so that we’re not here all day.
Calmes uses as one of her sources a man named Mike Sacks. I’ve never met Sacks. Sacks didn’t know any of my friends. Sacks did not attend the same school Kavanaugh and I did. Sacks was profiled in the Washington Post in October 2018 because the Washington Post could not find anyone who actually knew us who wanted to talk to them. “For the record,” the Post noted, “Sacks didn’t go to Georgetown Prep in Bethesda, the school Kavanaugh and Judge attended. He went to public school. He didn’t belong to a country club, just the neighborhood pool.”
That doesn’t stop Calmes:
Mike Sacks, who grew up in affluent Potomac, Maryland, four years behind Kavanaugh, milked his memories of Washington’s Reagan-era suburbia for his media projects. While this family wasn’t rich and he didn’t go to a prep school or belong to a country club, Sacks spent time with ‘this entitled type,’ as he describes Kavanaugh. ‘things had a tendency to happen while you were around them. When they got drunk, all bets were off.’
There really is no way to put too fine a point on this: Jackie Calmes uses, as a source, a man who by his own admission has never laid eyes on me, Brett Kavanaugh, or anyone from Georgetown Prep. Using this model, I could find someone who says that Jackie Calmes is a “type,” and “all bets are off” when she sits down to write.
Then there is Calmes’ selective editing. In 2018, New York Times book critic Dwight Garner reviewed my book Wasted, which was used by opposition researchers to try to sink Kavanaugh. Calmes uses this line about me from Garner’s review: “Wasted is the story of a privileged young white man, a cocky princeling among cocky princelings.”
In fact, that’s only half of the sentence. Here is the full quote: “Wasted is the story of a privileged young white man, a cocky princeling among cocky princelings, who loses his virginity, loses his religion, loses his lunch and nearly loses his mind. These things happen to a cassette-powered soundtrack by AC/DC, The Clash, Eurythmics, R.E.M. and The Replacements.”
Calmes was eager to quote Mike Sacks, a man who has never met me or my high school friends, but she is careful to not quote Dwight Garner’s conclusion about my book:
It’s moving when Judge finally admits he has a problem and gets the help he needs. Reading the end of ‘Wasted,’ I felt the way the theater producer Joseph Papp reportedly did when he first read ‘The Normal Heart,’ the AIDS-era play by Larry Kramer. Papp said, ‘This is one of the worst things I have ever read, and I’m crying.’
Yes, it seems like she may have it out for me, but that kind of writing is also the sort that may drive the curious to the source material, which makes me look somewhat sympathetic, if not saintly.
If that’s a stretch, consider the case for Calmes being an RNC mole after reading the case she presents for convicted felon, Michael Avenatti and his client, Julie Swetnick. This moronic duo accused Brett and me of being at multiple parties where girls were getting gang raped. Swetnick claimed that she herself was raped at on of these parties, telling NBC that she had filed a police report. Toward the end of Dissent, Calmes reveals that she tried to uncover the Swetnick report:
County officials never did search for any Swetnick police filling. The 1982 records had not been digitized, and the county records custodian told me in September 2019 that no one, including Avenatti, would pay the $1,260 charge for looking through their thousand boxes of hundreds of microfiche files for the year. I paid the county to do so, but rescinded the work order when Swetnick, in a brief interview before the search began, retracted her claim that she was assaulted in 1982. She’d specified that year in both her sworn statement and her NBC appearance, but a year later told me it could have been 1980 or 1981.
So Calmes exposes Swetnick as a fraud. She then helps to expose Keith Koegler. In the summer of 2018 Ford was working with an opposition researcher named Keith Koegler. The Education of Brett Kavanaugh, written by two New York Times reporters, offers the evidence.
Keith Koegler was a voracious reader and a technical thinker. In his second-floor home office, he’d spent many hours that summer poring over news coverage of the nomination process, biographical information about Kavanaugh, and writings and videos produced by Mark Judge. In combing through YouTube, articles, and social networks, Koegler had learned more about the house parties . . . and the lexicon of 1980s Georgetown Prep than he had ever thought he would care to know.
In Dissent, Calmes adds more. Even before Kavanaugh became Trump’s final pick for the Court, Koegler had gotten the name from Ford:
Koehler recognized the name. As a lawyer, he had become interested in the politics surrounding the federal courts, and the influence of the Federalist Society, in the two years since Mitch McConnell blocked President Obama’s Nomination of Merrick Garland. Now Koegler indeed began reading up on Kavanaugh. From that point on, he became Ford’s all around confidant, legal aid, and character witness.
So to recap: The only person Calmes could find to talk about Kavanaugh and me is a guy who never met us; the police report for a crime that never happened doesn’t exist; and paying for its nonreveal was a huge solid to me personally, who didn’t really have the c-note to throw away.
Finally, in Dissent, Jackie Calmes writes:
Kavanaugh’s close friend and football teammate Mark Judge would provide a revealing window into the guys’ attitude toward the non-Catholic girls, writing in his ‘underground’ student newspaper The Unknown Hoya that Holton Arms . . .” is the home of the most worthless excuse for human females.’ A Holton girl was an ‘H.H.,’ he wrote: Holton Hosebag.
There’s only one problem. I did not write those words. Calmes may, in fact, be giving me yet another chance to clear my name on another score, once again doing me a solid. After all, she has more than three decades of experience at newspapers and must know that editors, even editors of farcical high school newspapers, don’t write all the articles in their publications.
So thanks, Jackie. I’ll greet you with the secret handshake at the next QAnon meeting!