Tucker Carlson: Is Ford's Kavanaugh story rooted in a 'recovered' memory? It's not the only fair question to be asked

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Tucker Carlson Tonight – Wednesday, October 3

On Wednesday, Tucker Carlson examines the lack of consistent evidence presented against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Then later, Tucker sits with Lou Dobbs to discuss Senator Graham’s poor reception for defending Kavanaugh. Plus: Tucker shares the latest developments from his Google Probe.

After all the delays and countless twists in the Brett Kavanaugh saga, we may finally be closing in on a conclusion.

The FBI investigation, one that Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake demanded last Friday, is over. The report is in the hands of the bureau, and a final vote on putting Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court could be held this weekend.

But what's remarkable is that, after all we have learned, there are still basic questions that remain unanswered. They are central ones that pertain directly to the core allegations here, the ones that Christine Ford made more than two weeks ago.

Tuesday, for example, Fox News obtained a written declaration from an ex-boyfriend of Ford. In that declaration, which was made under oath, the ex-boyfriend said that Ford once coached a friend through a polygraph exam to help her get a federal job. If true, that would contradict what Ford told Congress.

The man also says that, during their entire six-year relationship, Ford never mentioned being a victim of sexual assault, or any other kind of trauma. He says that she flew on airplanes many times, including on small prop planes around Hawaii.

You'll recall that her lawyers said she was too afraid to fly to come to Washington. They also said she was a claustrophobic. Her ex claims she was not at all afraid of enclosed spaces. Are these claims true? We don't know. Ford disputes them and there is no evidence to support them independently.

There's also no evidence to support Ford's allegation that a teenaged Kavanaugh forcibly groped her at a party nearly 40 years ago. And that is the point. We need to know more. But we don't know more because nobody is asking these questions and many other questions.

For example, we still haven't seen Ford's therapy notes or the notes on the polygraph exam she says she took. Ford's legal team is only now, at the very last moment, offering to reveal these, but only if the FBI agrees to interview Christine Ford. That is not going to happen. But why weren't these notes turned over at the very beginning of all of this?

If the goal is to get to the truth, they would have been of course. Why has Ford apparently told different stories about whether she showed her therapy notes to The Washington Post or simply described their contents to the paper?

That's significant because it bears directly on her credibility. And Ford's credibility is literally the only reason to believe that her story is true. So that matters. There are other obvious unanswered questions.

Ford says the assault defined her entire life. Apparently, she thought about it every day. It affected her academic performance and all of her personal relationships, yet she says she told not a single other human being about it for fully 30 years.

How can that be? Well, here's an idea. In a Washington Post profile, Ford says that she "came to understand her assault and the significance during a psychotherapy session." What does that mean exactly? Is Ford's story at least in part a recovered memory?

This is a critical question, because most psychiatrists consider recovered memories, however sincere, as roughly as reliable as dreams. It's worth getting a clear answer, but so far nobody has, because nobody has asked that question. Why is that?

When an adult makes a serious allegation, asking real questions is the only correct response. It's not an attack to ask for follow-ups or probe inconsistencies, it's not victim shaming. In fact, it's patronizing not to.

We don't consider Christine Ford a child. Many of her advocates clearly do and so does the press. Instead of gathering facts about this story, they are busy moralizing and lecturing the rest of us about how Kavanaugh's very existence proves that an entire class of people is evil.

The real evil is the way that our elites stoke race and gender hatred in order to divide this country. And that is another thing that people of good faith ought to be questioning.

Adapted from Tucker Carlson’s monologue on "Tucker Carlson Tonight," Oct. 3, 2018