Heidi Przybyla appeared on Morning Joe today with news about how Brett Kavanaugh and his team "were communicating behind the scenes with friends to refute the claim according to text messages obtained by NBC News."
The claim is Debbie Ramirez's story about a party where Brett Kavanaugh shoved his junk in her face.
"So the question now as the White House says, it is going to allow a no-holds barred investigation is, are the people who think that they have credible information going to be heard? Yesterday we spoke with a woman who is a mutual friend of both Debra Ramirez and Brett Kavanagh who says she has very relevant information and has been unable to get any response from the FBI to receive that information," Przybyla said.
"Specifically, she said she is in the possession of a series of texts from another mutual friend who was in their tight knit circle of friends at Yale, and those text messages show a few things. First of all, she said they show that Brett Kavanagh very much was aware that this story about Debbie Ramirez was coming, that she is concerned he may have known well in advance and anticipated this story, and that he was trying to control the narrative around it.
"There are specific text messages from her friend, one friend to another, saying that Brett specifically was asking her to do things, including to track down a photo of the two of them at a previous wedding that they had attended and that Brett was pushing the other friend to come forward and to refute Debbie Ramirez's story. Now, it's important to say that Judiciary Committee last night in response to this, I believe, did release some transcripts showing that Brett Kavanagh was insisting that it was actually Debbie Ramirez who was pushing for people to come forward in advance.
"But it's still something that my source, who is their mutual friend and is named Carrie Berchim, thinks needs to be looked into. Second of all -- and this is possibly the most important -- is that -- remember the context of this. These are two women, two friends who have no intention of making this information public, and yet the one is texting to the other that at that wedding, which was ten years after the alleged incident, that Debbie Ramirez was, quote, acting very odd, that she clung to her friend and she was trying to avoid Brett Kavanagh, that there was something weird going on there.
"And the classmate said now with these allegations coming out, 'it all makes sense to me.' Another thing we found out last night that was very odd is that, apparently at the time around September 22nd, when Brett Kavanagh was desperately seeking this photo, three days later he was asked specifically hearing whether he attended this wedding and he said he had no recollection. So something there that definitely needs to be looked into by the FBI. At this point, we're not sure if it will be."
Kasie Hunt asked if the text messages show that Kavanagh "definitively knew that the New Yorker story was coming before it came out? Because he said it explicitly in the hearing that he had no idea this was coming until he actually read it in the magazine."
"Exactly. That is the discrepancy," Przybyla said.
"That when he was asked by Orrin Hatch, Orrin Hatch asked him, 'when did you find out about these allegations?' He said in the New Yorker story. According to the texts that we obtained prior to the publication of the story, Brett specifically was mentioned as someone who was approaching his classmate personally and asking her to come forward to refute the story. Other references in the text messages in advance of the story referred to Brett's guy, Brett's team, asking for information."
