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Julie Swetnick Accuses Brett Kavanaugh Of s*xual Misconduct, Alleges He Was Present During 'Gang Rape'
HuffPost Nick Visser,HuffPost 2 hours 5 minutes ago
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(Joshua Roberts / Reuters)

Michael Avenatti said Wednesday that Julie Swetnick is his client accusing Brett Kavanaugh of s*xual misconduct, marking the third woman to come forward with claims against the Supreme Court nominee in just over a week.

In a sworn declaration, Swetnick — a Washington, D.C., resident — said she was a “victim of one of these ‘gang’ or ‘train’ rapes where Mark Judge and Brett Kavanaugh were present” at a party in D.C. in approximately 1982.

“During the incident, I was incapacitated without my consent and unable to fight off the boys raping me,” she wrote, noting that she shared what happened with “at least two other people” shortly after the incident. “I believe I was drugged using Quaaludes or something similar placed in what I was drinking.”

Swetnick said she first met Kavanaugh and Judge, a classmate of Kavanaugh’s who came to the nominee’s defense, around 1980 or 1981. She described the two as “extremely close friends” who were “joined at the hip.”

She said she attended “well over ten house parties” from 1981 to 1983. Between 1981 and 1982, she said at these parties she began to notice Judge, Kavanaugh and others would attempt to “‘spike’ the ‘punch’ at house parties I attended with drugs and/or grain alcohol so as to cause girls to lose their inhibitions and their ability to say ‘No.’”

Kavanaugh and Judge, she said, would “‘target’ particular girls … it was usually a girl that was especially vulnerable because she was alone at the party or shy.” She said she has a “firm recollection” of seeing boys ? including Judge and Kavanaugh ? “lined up outside rooms at many of these parties waiting for their ‘turn’ with a girl inside the room.”

In response to: New Jersey Woman on Oxygen Dies After Electric Company Shuts Off Her Power

Linda Daniels died on Thursday after power was shut off at her home in Newark and the electric-powered oxygen tank she used to breathe stopped working.Creditvia Desiree Washington

By Matthew Haag

July 9, 2018

New Jersey officials said on Monday they were investigating why a utility company shut off power last week at the Newark home of a woman in hospice care who then died after her electric-powered oxygen tank stopped operating.

Family members of the woman, Linda Daniels, said she gasped for air for hours on Thursday until she died of congestive heart failure. The company, Public Service Electric and Gas Company, had cut off power to her home that morning because of overdue bills.

The family said they pleaded with the company to restore electricity, telling customer service representatives that Ms. Daniels, 68, depended on oxygen equipment in order to breathe. Power was eventually returned to the home on Friday.

“She was scared, and she was holding our hands tightly,” said Desiree Washington, Ms. Daniels’s daughter. “She was horrified. We were all horrified.”

The case has caught the attention of regulatory officials in New Jersey, where utilities are prohibited from shutting off power to people with medical emergencies. The company said Monday that it was not aware that Ms. Daniels had a medical condition, though her relatives said it had been notified.

The state’s Board of Public Utilities said it had opened an investigation.

“BPU is investigating the circumstances surrounding the tragic death of Linda Daniels last week at her home in Newark,” a spokesman said. “As part of our investigation, we are in the process of gathering all appropriate information in order to determine how this could have occurred.”

Ms. Washington said her mother’s home lost power around 10 a.m. on Thursday. When she arrived later that morning, the heat was suffocating. The high temperature on Thursday in Newark was 91 degrees.

Family members repeatedly called the utility company, she said.

“We kept calling, and they said to stop calling,” Ms. Washington said. “What kind of customer service is that?”

The family also called 911 to have paramedics bring a portable oxygen tank so Ms. Daniels could breathe. Even with the aid of the portable tank, Ms. Daniels’s health continued to decline and she died shortly before
4:00 pm.

John Sharpe James, a Newark City Council member who represents the area where Ms. Daniels lived, said he was concerned about what had transpired and had asked the utility company for an explanation.

He said he planned to meet with the family on Tuesday.

“I will give them time, but ultimately it’s a very sad day and it’s an unfortunate incident,” Mr. James said. “We want to ensure it doesn’t happen again, and we cannot have our senior population in jeopardy like that.”

Officials at Public Service Electric and Gas Company said Monday that they had started an internal investigation into the case. But so far, they have uncovered no indication of a medical condition on Ms. Daniels’s account, which was past due $1,500 as of last week.

“This account was severely in arrears, and we made at least 26 attempts to notify the customer since January 2018, including two visits to the residence prior to the disconnection,” the company said in a statement.

Workers would not have shut off power if they were notified of her medical condition, the company said, adding, “We are carefully reviewing everything that happened around this terrible incident.”

Relatives of Ms. Daniels said that both her family and hospice nurses had informed Public Service Electric and Gas Company long before Thursday about her medical condition.

In response to:

I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration

I work for the president but like-minded colleagues and I have vowed to thwart parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations
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Sept. 5, 2018

The Times today is taking the rare step of publishing an anonymous Op-Ed essay. We have done so at the request of the author, a senior official in the Trump administration whose identity is known to us and whose job would be jeopardized by its disclosure. We believe publishing this essay anonymously is the only way to deliver an important perspective to our readers. We invite you to submit a question about the essay or our vetting process here.

President Trump is facing a test to his presidency unlike any faced by a modern American leader.

It’s not just that the special counsel looms large. Or that the country is bitterly divided over Mr. Trump’s leadership. Or even that his party might well lose the House to an opposition hellbent on his downfall.

The dilemma — which he does not fully grasp — is that many of the senior officials in his own administration are working diligently from within to frustrate parts of his agenda and his worst inclinations.

I would know. I am one of them.

To be clear, ours is not the popular “resistance” of the left. We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous.

But we believe our first duty is to this country, and the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.

That is why many Trump appointees have vowed to do what we can to preserve our democratic institutions while thwarting Mr. Trump’s more misguided impulses until he is out of office.

The root of the problem is the president’s amorality. Anyone who works with him knows he is not moored to any discernible first principles that guide his decision making.

Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright.

In addition to his mass-marketing of the notion that the press is the “enemy of the people,” President Trump’s impulses are generally anti-trade and anti-democratic.

Don’t get me wrong. There are bright spots that the near-ceaseless negative coverage of the administration fails to capture: effective deregulation, historic tax reform, a more robust military and more.

But these successes have come despite — not because of — the president’s leadership style, which is impetuous, adversarial, petty and ineffective.

From the White House to executive branch departments and agencies, senior officials will privately admit their daily disbelief at the commander in chief’s comments and actions. Most are working to insulate their operations from his whims.

Meetings with him veer off topic and off the rails, he engages in repetitive rants, and his impulsiveness results in half-baked, ill-informed and occasionally reckless decisions that have to be walked back.

“There is literally no telling whether he might change his mind from one minute to the next,” a top official complained to me recently, exasperated by an Oval Office meeting at which the president flip-flopped on a major policy decision he’d made only a week earlier.

The erratic behavior would be more concerning if it weren’t for unsung heroes in and around the White House. Some of his aides have been cast as villains by the media. But in private, they have gone to great lengths to keep bad decisions contained to the West Wing, though they are clearly not always successful.