The FBI conducted a sham investigation into Brett Kavanaugh. Surprised? | Moira Donegan

MMaybe it was always clear that the whole thing was a sham. In 2018, when Christine Blasey Ford, Deborah Ramirez and others accused then-Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault, Blasey Ford's compelling testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee briefly seemed like it could derail the nomination . This was the height of #MeToo, remember: Back then, many women came forward with their own stories of sexual violence, and the reports were numerous enough and had enough moral authority that powerful people found it necessary to pretend they took care of it.

Republican senators wanted to confirm Kavanaugh quickly: the judge, then sitting in the D.C. Circuit, would cast the crucial fifth vote to overturn Roe v. Wade and also support efforts to enshrine various other Republican policy goals into law. However, women caused a stir: two cornered then-Arizona Senator Jeff Flake in an elevator and yelled at him to be ashamed of himself. In a livestream of the altercation that went viral on social media, it looked like he was. All of this made things a little awkward for Republicans: They wanted to vote for Kavanaugh, but needed a political cover to do so. This is where the FBI came into play.

The FBI was tasked with investigating the allegations against Kavanaugh. The idea, we were told, was that the office would be competent and impartial and get to the bottom of the matter. The FBI hotline received tips. There were multiple allegations against Kavanaugh, and witnesses to his alleged misconduct with women—a seemingly endless number of former college classmates who, for example, had seen a drunken Kavanaugh pull out his penis at Yale and shove it in a freshman's face—came forward with what they believe is urgent information about the judge's character. They portrayed him as a boorish, drunken, groping misogynist, a man without dignity or self-confidence, clearly unfit for the office for which he had been nominated. Maybe their mistake was thinking it would matter. The FBI completed its “investigation” within a week. You never interviewed Blasey Ford.

On Tuesday, the office of Sheldon Whitehouse, a senator from Rhode Island, released a report that confirmed what many of us watching this riot already knew: There was no real investigation into Kavanaugh's conduct. Instead, the FBI allowed itself to be used as a prop for a political theater staged by the Trump administration that was designed not to uncover the truth about the sexual assault allegations against Kavanaugh but to bury it.

Several of the senators who subsequently voted to confirm Kavanaugh cited the FBI investigation as justification: After all, the FBI had found no corroborating evidence. The truth is that the FBI was not allowed to search for such evidence. The Trump White House, the report said, “exercised complete control over the scope of the investigation and prevented the FBI from interviewing relevant witnesses and following up on leads.” The White House refused to authorize basic investigative steps, which may have uncovered information supporting the allegations.”

The FBI's hotline received thousands of tips, many of which corroborated the detailed, credible statements that Ford and Ramirez had already given. The White House threw those tips away. “At the direction of the White House, the FBI did not investigate thousands of tips received through the FBI tip line,” the White House report said. “Instead, all Kavanaugh-related tips were forwarded to the White House without investigation. If anything, the White House may have used the tip line to divert FBI investigators from derogatory or damaging information.”

It is worth making clear what the Whitehouse report alleges: that the president, with the full support of his staff, used the authority of his office to cover up multiple sexual assaults on behalf of a man whose career they sought to advance because they believed, right, that he would help them abolish abortion rights. It would have been cruel enough if Trump had simply continued to support Kavanaugh despite the allegations. But he didn't do that. He actively helped suppress the truth about him.

Much has been written about Trump's style of masculinity and how he has revitalized the Republican Party around male grievances. His domineering, often crudely sexual masculinity is often seen as a contrast – or perhaps a complement – to the more patronizing and paternalistic styles of Republican male chauvinism seen in Christian right-wing types like his first vice president Mike Pence or in pro-natalists Families value cults like the one from which his current candidate, JD Vance, comes. Trump's rise to the top of the Republican Party was innovative in this respect: He brought the lecherous boys of America into an alliance with the repressive preacher types.

But he never really had to make that alliance with Kavanaugh. Kavanaugh and Trump are much more cut from the same cloth. Both have a drive for dominance that has allegedly led them to sexually abuse women – remember that like Kavanaugh, Trump has also been accused of sexual abuse by more than two dozen women and a civil jury in New York has found him liable for the sexual assault of writer E. Jean Carroll last year. Both seem to need the admiration and approval of other men: Christine Blasey Ford's depiction of a drunken Kavanaugh ripping off his clothes while his boyfriend looks on laughing is not so different in this respect from Trump on the Access Hollywood tape, who is desperate to shock and impress Billy Bush by bragging that he can “grab her by the pussy.”

To say that such men hate women would be almost an understatement: they don't think enough about women to hate us. To them, we are little more than tools in the search for small satisfactions – nothing more than tools to satisfy their egos and get what they want as quickly as possible. This apparently also applies to the FBI.