“The View‘s” Abby Huntsman was repeatedly shut down Monday after claiming Democrats were to blame for the scandal surrounding U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh.
Last week news reports emerged that Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, was in possession of a letter from a then-unnamed woman accusing Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her at a party in the 1980s when both were teenagers. The accusation said the then-17-year-old Kavanaugh pinned her down, groped her, and tried to remove her clothes. This past weekend a California professor named Christine Blasey Ford came forward to reveal she was the one who wrote the letter to Sen. Feinstein in July. Kavanaugh, a D.C. Circuit Court judge handpicked by President Donald Trump, has strongly denied the accusation, saying “I’ve never done anything like what the accuser describes — to her or to anyone.”
“I feel for her in this moment because she’s obviously kept this with her if this is all true for almost 37 years now,” Huntsman said of Ford, criticizing the state of American politics and the GOP’s treatment of Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland. Garland, President Obama’s nominee to fill the seat vacated by the February 2016 death of Justice Antonin Scalia, was denied a vote on the Senate floor by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Republicans succeeded in keeping the vacancy for more than a year until Trump filled it with Neil Gorsuch.
“[Sen.] Dianne Feinstein had this letter where this woman anonymously details what she went through,” Huntsman continued. “It seems as if the Democrats put this in a drawer and said ‘this is big, and this is going to benefit us if we use the time perfectly.’”
Co-host Whoopi Goldberg quickly corrected her, saying, “You do know that [Ford] asked Dianne Feinstein to keep it private? We don’t know who leaked. There’s some conversation that perhaps the young woman’s husband in a way to get his wife’s story out there because people weren’t talking about it. Maybe he put it out there.”
Continuing with her point, Goldberg argued it was a lose-lose situation for the Democrats, so it wouldn’t have made sense for them to leak it.
“If they brought it out in July, people would have said, ‘oh, you’re bringing it out to hurt him because he’s a fan of the president,'” she said. “If they waited and not done it people would have said, ‘oh you’re doing it because it’s political.’ I don’t think they could have won here.”
Huntsman refused to back down from her argument, however, saying the situation “does feel political to me and I think that’s what a lot of people hate about politics.”
The conservative co-host also got pushback from co-host Sunny Hostin, who smacked down the assertion that the Dems were to blame.
“The timeline really does not support that the Democrats somehow kept this a secret intentionally to sort of drop a surprise,” Hostin explained, pointing that out Ford’s story began 2012 when she detailed the alleged attack in a couples therapy session with her husband. She later contacted a newspaper anonymously when she learned Kavanaugh was on the short list of nominees.
Huntsman tried yet again to flip the script, arguing that the Democrats were plotting to take Kavanaugh down by leaking Ford’s letter.
“But they didn’t do that,” Goldberg replied sternly. “I’m sorry, this all went down because [online news magazine] the Intercept made a decision to release that. Dianne Feinstein didn’t release that.”
Watch more in the clip below.
