Christine Blasey Ford will testify tomorrow before the Senate Judiciary Committee about her 36-year-old recollection of alleged sexual assault by Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, who was 17 at the time. But the 11 Republican Senators who sit on that committee won’t question her. Like, at all. Because they don’t want to personally contribute to nationwide female-voter pushback in the coming midterm elections. In short, they’re too chicken.
And so a rightwing surrogate inquisitor — Rachel Mitchell, an Arizona prosecutor who specializes in sex crimes — will do the dirty work instead.
Mitchell has been a Maricopa County prosecutor since 1993, which is the same year when the notorious pro-Trump blowhard Joe Arpaio became sheriff of Maricopa County. (He stayed in that office until losing re-election in 2016.) One can infer that Rachel and Joe weren’t too far apart politically. It can also be presumed that the 11 Senators wouldn’t have arranged for Mitchell to question Ford unless they knew she would do her best to weaken (i.e., cast doubt upon) her anti-Kavanaugh testimony as much as possible.
But as the former head of Maricopa County’s sex crimes bureau, which handles child molestations as well as adult sexual assault, Mitchell has a certain expertise. She’s now the head of the Special Victims Division, which investigates sex crimes and family violence. “She’s one of these career prosecutors who specializes in sex crimes,” Paul Ahler, who worked at the county attorney’s office years ago, told The Arizona Republic. “It’s hard to find those people because a lot of people get burned out on those issues, but it’s kind of been her life mission.”
Interesting Mitchell quote: “People think that children would tell right away and that they would tell everything that happened to them. In reality children often keep this secret for years, sometimes into their adulthood, sometimes forever.” Ford was 15 when she was allegedly assaulted by Kavanaugh. She obviously wasn’t a child at the time, but she wasn’t an adult either.
