Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh was cruising to confirmation until he fell victim to a Democratic character assassination spearheaded by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.

Feinstein, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s ranking member, has led the clandestine effort to rub out Kavanaugh’s sterling reputation, and with it his candidacy for the nation’s highest court.

Exhibit No. 1 is the Sept. 30 report of Rachel Mitchell, the Arizona sex-crimes prosecutor who last week publicly questioned Kavanaugh’s chief accuser, Professor Christine Blasey Ford.

Mitchell’s memo dismantles Ford’s story alleging Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her some 36 years ago when both were high school students.

"I do not think a reasonable prosecutor would bring this case based on the evidence before the Committee,” Mitchell concluded in her report. Her published timeline details how Feinstein and her Democratic colleagues staged a veritable mob hit on Kavanaugh. The following quotes are from Mitchell’s document, unless otherwise indicated:

July 6 (Day 1): Ford rings her representative in the U.S. House, Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., and asks to meet. Ford also “texts the Washington Post tipline” and claims that “Brett Kavanaugh with Mark Judge” attacked her while “PJ” was a “bystander.”

July 9 (Day 3): President Trump nominates to the Supreme Court Brett Kavanaugh, a judge on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. As Senate Judiciary Chairman (SJC) Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, recently noted: “The president added Judge Kavanaugh to his short list of Supreme Court [designees] more than nine months ago, in November 2017.” Ford says she heard Kavanaugh’s name in this context.

July 20 (Day 14): “Ford and Eshoo met for ‘more than an hour and half’ in a ‘conference room.’” Eshoo suggests that Ford write Feinstein.

July 30 (Day 24): Ford’s letter is delivered to Feinstein’s Washington office.

July 31 (Day 25): Feinstein writes Ford. “The letter promises not to share Ford’s letter without her explicit consent. Ford did not provide this letter to the Committee.”

Between July 30 and Aug. 7 (Days 24 to 32): Feinstein and her staff recommend to Ford “that she engage Debra Katz,” a far-left attorney spotted at anti-Trump rallies. As Gregg Jarrett of Fox News reports, Katz has said: “We are going to resist. We will not be silenced.” Michael Bromwich also joins Ford’s legal team. He also represents Andrew McCabe, the disgraced and dismissed FBI deputy director who abused the Russiagate and Hillary Clinton email scandals.

Aug. 20 (Day 45): Three weeks after receiving Ford’s letter, “Senator Feinstein meets one-on-one with Kavanaugh.” Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, asked last week what happened.

HATCH: Did the ranking member raise these allegations in your one-on-one meeting with her last month?

KAVANAUGH: She did not.

Aug. 28 (Day 53): In a background investigation (BI) call, “Senator Feinstein’s staff asked Judge Kavanaugh numerous questions about confidential background information,” but left Ford’s incendiary charges unmentioned.

Sept. 4 to 7 (Days 60 to 63): The Senate Judiciary Committee publicly questions Kavanaugh for 32 hours.

HATCH: Did the ranking member raise them [Ford’s accusations] at your public hearing earlier this month?

KAVANAUGH: No.

Sept. 6 (Day 62): “SJC gives Senators an opportunity to question Kavanaugh about sensitive issues at a closed session.” As Sen. Ben Sasse, R-Neb., explained: “Senators could ask questions that are awkward or uncomfortable about potential alcoholism, potential gambling addiction, credit card debt, if your buddies floated you money to buy baseball tickets.”

HATCH: Did the ranking member raise them [Ford’s charges] at the closed session that followed the public hearing?

KAVANAUGH: She was not there.

That’s right. Feinstein could have quizzed Kavanaugh about Ford’s explosive claims, before fellow senators and behind closed doors. But Feinstein didn’t bother to show up.

Around this time, Kavanaugh penned answers to senators’ additional queries.

HATCH: Did the ranking member or any of her colleagues raise them [Ford’s complaints] in the 1,300 written questions that were submitted to you following the hearing?

KAVANAUGH: No.

According to Grassley, Kavanaugh replied to 1,278 written interrogatories, versus 324 posed to Associate Justice Neil Gorsuch and 1,247 to all previous Supreme Court nominees combined. Again, not one of these questions to Kavanaugh addressed Ford’s accusations.

Sept. 12 (Day 68): The Intercept reports that Judiciary Committee Democrats asked Feinstein to share a “Kavanaugh-related document.” Debra Katz “is seen leaving Capitol Hill shortly after the Intercept story was published.”

Sept. 13 (Day 69): Forty-five days after acquiring it, “Senator Feinstein refers the letter to the FBI.”

Sept. 16 (Day 72): Feinstein’s time bomb finally explodes. The Washington Post unmasks Ford and reveals her story.

Sept. 17 (Day 73): “SJC has a follow-up BI call with Kavanaugh on the Ford letter. Senator Feinstein does not participate. Senator Feinstein’s staff did not show up.”

Sept. 25 to 26 (Days 81 and 82): “SJC speaks with Kavanaugh about the allegations against him. Senator Feinstein’s staff declared that they were present ‘under protest’ and did not participate.”

“Democratic staff was invited to participate and could have asked any questions they wanted to, but they declined,” Sen. Grassley said last week. “Which leads me then to wonder: If they’re really concerned with going to the truth, why wouldn’t you want to talk to the accused?”

Indeed, Feinstein led Democrats’ protests that the FBI did not question Ford or Kavanaugh in its just-concluded supplementary investigation. But Feinstein and company had both of these people before them in public and could have asked them anything. They also had Kavanaugh in private and could have grilled him like a salmon about these allegations. But they didn’t.

And now Feinstein and the Democrats are enraged at the FBI for not doing what these lawmakers failed to do? Huh?

Amid this obfuscation, obstruction, and delay, surely the Democrats’ motives are pristine.

Rubbish!

As Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said Monday about Feinstein: “The ranking member withheld serious allegations from committee colleagues, precluding any chance that they would be handled with sensitivity and discretion.”

Thus, Feinstein incinerated Ford’s confidentiality on the altar of partisan advantage. The incessant, degrading and nationally self-mutilating spectacle that still unfolds makes Anita Hill v. Clarence Thomas look like “The Sound of Music.”

Even worse, this is all deliberate. Feinstein’s nearly 12th hour garbage dump could not have been better timed – for anti-Kavanaugh, Trump-hating Democrats. Their slow-motion attempted rub-out of Kavanaugh is designed to bog things so far down that this Supreme Court seat stays empty through 2020.

“I think we’ve had those kinds of vacancies before, and we certainly had over a one-year vacancy with Merrick Garland,” Sen. Mazie Hirono, D-Hawaii, told Politico. “So the world does not come to an end because we don’t fill all of the nominees.”

Brian Fallon of the group Demand Justice, a former spokesman for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, echoed Hirono when he said: “Saving the Supreme Court from Trump’s clutches has always involved a very complicated two-step: first, block Kavanaugh, then fight like hell to win back the Senate. If Kavanaugh drops out, we’re halfway there. If Democrats are able to win back the Senate, we’d have a path to blocking Trump from picking any of the archconservatives on his shortlist.”

As a bonus for Democrats, every day Americans discuss adolescent flatulence, teenage beer consumption, and secondary school sexuality is yet another day in which Americans do not discuss rampant gross domestic product growth, soaring employment and record-high consumer confidence. Democrats are thrilled to deflect voters’ eyes from the glittering data of Trumponomics.

Feinstein confirms that this is not your mother’s Democratic Party. This once-honorable lawmaker is stooped with the left-wing rabble. They will dive into any gutter to grab what they want – fairness, due process, the presumption of innocence, and basic human decency be damned.

Unlike President Kennedy, the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York and former Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, today’s Democrats want total control so that they can bark orders at people about every aspect of life: wage floors, ceiling fans, plastic straws, school curricula, Internet speeds, corporate-board gender quotas, and much more.

Kavanaugh threatens Democrats’ unlimited-government agenda. So they did not simply oppose his jurisprudence. (Democrats dredged his high school yearbook more thoroughly than his 306 judicial opinions.) Instead, Democrats discarded Kavanaugh like an abandoned vehicle, crushed him into a cube, and dropped him from a junkyard electromagnet onto a heap of scrap metal.

For this, Brett Kavanaugh’s character assassin – the calculating Dianne Feinstein – should resign and spend the rest of her life hanging her head in shame.