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NBC Stealth Edits Article Accusing Kavanaugh Of Perjury

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Amber Athey Podcast Columnist
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NBC News accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of perjury in a Monday article before editing the piece with additional context that disproved their own claim.

NBC reported Monday evening that Kavanaugh was seeking out friends to refute the claims of his second accuser, Deborah Ramirez, before her allegations were published in The New Yorker on Sept. 23.

The report suggested that Kavanaugh was lying under oath when he said the first time he heard about Ramirez’s allegation was in The New Yorker.

“The texts show Kavanaugh may need to be questioned about how far back he anticipated that Ramirez would air allegations against him,” NBC said. “Kavanaugh told the Senate Judiciary Committee under oath that the first time he heard of Ramirez’s allegation was in the Sept. 23 article in The New Yorker.”

Kavanaugh explained in his testimony, however, that he heard Ramirez might accuse him of something because she was calling around to get her story straight. But he did not know the specific details of Ramirez’s allegation until it was published in The New Yorker.

“They couldn’t — the New York Times couldn’t corroborate this story and found that she was calling around to classmates trying to see if they remembered it. And I, at least — and I, myself, heard about that — that she was doing that,” Kavanaugh told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

He added that he had not heard about “the incident matching the description given by Ms. Ramirez” before The New Yorker article.

The original version of NBC’s article did not include Kavanaugh’s testimony that he heard Ramirez was calling around. In fact, they updated the article with the relevant testimony on Tuesday morning with no accompanying editor’s note.

NBC added the following paragraph to the article:

“In now-public transcripts from an interview with Republican Judiciary Committee staff on September 25, two days after the Ramirez allegations were reported in the New Yorker, Kavanaugh claimed that it was Ramirez who was ‘calling around to classmates trying to see if they remembered it,’ adding that it ‘strikes me as, you know, what is going on here? When someone is calling around to try to refresh other people? Is that what’s going on? What’s going on with that? That doesn’t sound — that doesn’t sound — good to me. It doesn’t sound fair. It doesn’t sound proper. It sounds like an orchestrated hit to take me out.'”

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