First lady Melania Trump reportedly told her husband President Donald Trump that Christine Blasey Ford was lying when she gave a tearful testimony accusing Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault during his Supreme Justice confirmation hearings.
"You know that woman is lying, don't you?" Melania Trump told her husband, according to a New York Post report Sunday on the book Justice on Trial: The Kavanaugh Confirmation and the Future of the Supreme Court to be released Tuesday.
The book alleges that Melania Trump was one of the "millions of other women and men" who did not believe Ford's accusations that Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her when she was a teenager in 1982. Kavanaugh vehemently denied accusations of sexual misconduct and was confirmed by the Senate the week after Ford's testimony.
“You know that woman is lying, don’t you?” Melania Trump told President Trump about Christine Blasey Ford's testimony, according to a new book about the Brett Kavanaugh hearings https://t.co/CraT5fpRlv
— Nikki Schwab (@NikkiSchwab) July 7, 2019
Ford's "credibility, if anything, was viewed as stronger because of her lapses in memory and because the odder parts to the story, such as her description of how she came to tell her husband about the assault," wrote the conservative authors Mollie Hemingway, a senior editor at The Federalist, and Carrie Severino, who is chief counsel and policy director of the Judicial Crisis Network.
"Despite the holes in her story, the media clung to these details," the book states.
The first lady in October said that Kavanaugh was "highly qualified for the Supreme Court," and, "I'm glad that Dr. Ford was heard, I'm glad that Judge Kavanaugh was heard, FBI investigation was done, is completed and the Senate voted." Melania Trump also said "we need to have really hard evidence ... if you accuse [someone] of something."
Melania Trump's spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Newsweek on Monday.
The president reportedly often seeks out his wife's opinions. Donald Trump while pursuing the presidency would often joke, "You know who my absolute best pollster is? Melania," his longtime associate Roger Stone is quoted as saying in the book The Method to the Madness: Donald Trump's Ascent as Told by Those Who Were Hired, Fired, Inspired—and Inaugurated by journalists Allen Salkin and Aaron Short also out Tuesday.
Donald Trump "listens to [Melania] more intently than anyone and respects her advice and counsel not only because she is his wife, but because her loyalty, grace, trust, elegance under fire, intellect and instincts are time tested and proven," the president's friend Thomas J. Barrack Jr. told The New York Times in August.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
About the writer
A Los Angeles native, Jessica Kwong grew up speaking Spanish, Cantonese and English, in that order. Her journalism career started ... Read more
