Here’s the Truth About Brett Kavanaugh’s Finances

[SVPete]

Here’s the Truth About Brett Kavanaugh’s Finances

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2021/09/heres-the-truth-about-brett-kavanaughs-finances/

It’s become a predictable pattern: The Supreme Court issues a controversial ruling on a hot-button social issue, and then Justice Brett Kavanaugh trends on Twitter. Earlier this month, it happened again after the court refused to block the recent Texas law that all but bans abortion. Almost immediately, hashtags like #WhoOwnsKavanaugh and #BrettsDebts blossomed across social media. The tweets are driven by frustrated liberals who continue to believe that the Trump-appointed justice has been bought off by a secret, deep-pocketed benefactor who has allowed him to live well above his judicial salary.

The frenzy is not merely predicated on the antipathy liberals have for this particular conservative justice, but on to the fragile hope that it might lead to ousting him from his lifetime appointment. As the novelist Greg Olear, who has devoted thousands of words to Kavanaugh’s finances on his Substack, explained after the Texas abortion decision:

“[T]here is nothing we can do about Barrett, Alito, or Gorsuch, and not much we can do about Thomas…But Kavanaugh is different. There is a clear playbook to removing him from the bench. And this is what must be done. Not because we don’t like his politics, although we don’t; not because we think he’s an asshole, although he is; not because he had a hissy fit at his confirmation hearing, although he did. No, we must remove him because at least twice in his life, some unknown entity endowed him with major infusions of cash, and Kavanaugh lied, under oath, about the provenance of that cash.”

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The idea that Brett Kavanaugh has taken bribes to sustain his country club lifestyle is one of the hardiest conspiracy theories on the political left. And like most conspiracy theories, this one suffers from some internal logic problems. Yet lots of otherwise smart people who see conspiracy theories as solely a scourge of the right seem to believe it, in part because, as with so many such myths, the Kavanaugh conspiracy theory originated with a few facts. ...
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The vanishing debts, and their size, raised enough suspicion that Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) even asked Kavanaugh in written follow-up questions whether he might have a gambling problem. (He said no.) Further concerns involved the purchase of his tony Chevy Chase, Md., house in 2006 for $1.225 million. How did Kavanaugh come up with a $245,000 down payment at a time when his financial disclosure forms indicated that he had a mere $10,000 in the bank outside of his federal retirement account?

As it turned out, there were rather simple answers to most of those questions. Kavanaugh explained to the Senate Judiciary Committee that much of his credit card debt stemmed from either work on his fixer-upper mansion or buying Nats season and playoff tickets for himself and a handful of dudes who’d been going to the games together for years. They had paid him back in full, the White House said at the time. As for the rest, while he was maddeningly obtuse in admitting it, Kavanaugh seems to have gotten lots of money from his parents.
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Kavanaugh’s parents ensured he had a privileged upbringing—high school at Georgetown Prep in suburban Washington and an Ivy League education that seems to have left him without a whiff of student loan debt. Their largesse seems to have followed him into adulthood. As Kavanaugh explained in his written answers to Whitehouse: “We have not received financial gifts other than from our family, which are excluded from disclosure in judicial financial disclosure reports.” ...