Michael Bromwich, the Justice Department (DOJ) inspector general for the bulk of President Bill Clinton’s administration, announced Saturday he had joined Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser’s legal team under lead attorney Deborah Katz.
Bromwich is also representing fired FBI Deputy Director Andy McCabe, who is facing criminal prosecution for allegedly lying to DOJ Office of the Inspector General (OIG) investigators during their probe of leaks to the media during the Clinton email investigation McCabe oversaw. A grand jury has reportedly been impaneled in that case.
Bromwich and his business partner Melissa Schwartz confirmed reports he had agreed to help Christine Blasey Ford on Twitter:
Ford accuses Kavanaugh of having drunkenly groped her at a high school party when he was 17.
Like Katz, a Democratic donor and left-wing activist, Bromwich has a long history of involvement in cases closely tied to the political ambitions of the Democratic Party. During the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s, he served as an Office of Independent Counsel prosecutor. He helped secure convictions of Reagan administration National Security Council staffer Lt. Col. Oliver North. Those convictions were all later reversed on appeal.
In 2010, following the Deepwater Horizon disaster, President Barack Obama picked Bromwich to oversee efforts to overhaul offshore drilling regulations. His recommendations quickly came under fire from the energy industry for “stifling” production.
In 2012, as the Fast and Furious scandal broke, Bromwich served as counsel to Jason Weinstein, a DOJ official he had originally hired in the 1990s who resigned from the department after Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report savaged him over his oversight of the ATF’s “Fast and Furious” gun-walking operation.
Bromwich will join Ford’s team shortly after Katz sent the Senate Judiciary Committee a letter in which she claims her client “agrees” to testify. The text of that letter, however, quickly makes clear Katz has come to no agreement, having agreed neither to any of the dates offered by the committee or to any of the terms that were made clear in a letter addressed to Ford’s legal team on Friday.
As with all previous public communications on the matter, Katz demands further delays, which, at this point, stand the very real possibility of rendering Kavanaugh’s confirmation before the start of the Supreme Court’s October term impossible.