President Donald Trump, fighting to shore up his nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the US Supreme Court in a divided Senate, has called sexual misconduct allegations against the judge "a con game being played by the Democrats."
Trump's escalation in his rhetoric defending Kavanaugh came as the Republican-led Senate Judiciary Committee announced the hiring of a woman lawyer who is "an expert sex crimes prosecutor" to question one of the nominee's accusers, Christine Blasey Ford, at a high-stakes hearing scheduled on Thursday.
The committee also scheduled a vote on Kavanaugh's nomination for Friday. Senior Senate Republicans said a vote in the full Senate could happen as early as next Tuesday.
In a break from convention, the outside lawyer, whose name was not released, will question Ford and Kavanaugh on behalf of the committee's Republican senators, 11 white men. Typically, senators do the questioning themselves.
The move brought a rebuke from Senator Kamala Harris, a Democratic member of the Judiciary Committee.
"By hiring a private attorney to cross-examine Dr. Blasey Ford, Republicans are trying to intimidate her and avoid being held accountable by voters," Harris said in a Twitter posting.
Senate confirmation of Kavanaugh, a conservative federal appeals court judge chosen by Trump for a lifetime post on the high court, has been imperiled by the decades-old allegations by Ford and another woman, Deborah Ramirez.
"We're going to be moving forward," Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told reporters. "I'm confident we're going to win, confident that he'll be confirmed in the very near future."
Ford, a university professor in California, has accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her in 1982 when both were high school students in Maryland. Ramirez accused Kavanaugh in an article published on Sunday in the New Yorker magazine of exposing himself to her at a drunken dormitory party during the 1983-84 academic year at Yale University.
Kavanaugh has denied both allegations.
Trump said Ford's allegation was 36 years old "and nobody ever heard about it."
Of Ramirez's allegation, Trump said: "And now a new charge comes up. And she says: 'Well it might not be him.' And there were gaps. And she said she was totally inebriated, and she was all messed up, and she doesn't know it was him, but it might have been him."
"Oh, gee, let's not make him a Supreme Court judge because of that? This is a con game being played by the Democrats," Trump added.
Asked whether Ramirez should also be allowed to testify, Trump said: "The second accuser has nothing."
The Kavanaugh confirmation fight comes just weeks before November 6 congressional elections in which Democrats are trying to take control of Congress from Trump's fellow Republicans, against a backdrop of the #MeToo movement fighting sexual harassment and assault.
Kavanaugh's confirmation would firm up conservative control of the Supreme Court and advance Trump's goal of moving the high court and the broader federal judiciary to the right.
Republicans hold a slim 51-49 Senate majority, meaning Kavanaugh's confirmation prospects may hinge on the votes of a handful of moderate Republican senators who have not yet announced their intentions.
Australian Associated Press
