Who is Sen. Jeff Flake and what did he and Rosenstein talk about for 10 minutes?

Analysis by WorldTribune Staff, October 1, 2018

The Supreme Court’s 2018-2019 term opened on Oct. 1 with four conservative and four liberal justices – and conservative Brett Kavanaugh waiting in the wings thanks in large part to never-Trumper Arizona Republican Sen. Jeff Flake.

Flake delayed the Senate floor vote on Kavanaugh by calling for an FBI investigation into the 11th hour flurry of uncorroborated allegations against President Donald Trump’s nominee.

Sen. Jeff Flake greets Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein before the Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh on Sept. 4. / Getty Images / CQ Roll Call

His change of heart occurred after a series of huddles with Democrats preceded by a heated one-way elevator exchange with a woman who heads a think tank funded by leftist billionaire George Soros.

One of the last people Flake spoke to before calling for the probe was Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein.

Democratic Sen. Christopher Coons of Delaware estimated Flake spoke with Ronsenstein for about 10 minutes. A photo of the encounter depicted the normally worried-looking Flake smiling broadly.

Soon-to-be ex-Sen. Flake (he is not seeking re-election) is clearly a changed man.

“He said, ‘Look, I’m really having trouble with this,” Coons recounted, according to NBC News.

“I think this hearing is tearing the country apart. What you’re suggesting is perfectly reasonable. I think we ought to be trying to find a way to have a one-week pause.”

In an interview on “60 Minutes”, at which Coons also appeared, Flake said that if he were running for re-election he would not have called for the FBI investigation.

“This is astonishing,” columnist Cheryl K. Chumley wrote for The Washington Times. “What Flake is admitting, in essence, is that he is unprincipled – and not just a little bit unprincipled. Boldly unprincipled, by the tone of it.”

Flake went on to explain: “There’s no value to reaching across the aisle. There’s no currency for that any more. There’s no incentive.”

Chumley wrote: “Flake was never elected to Capitol Hill to reach across the aisle to Democrats. He was sent to Congress to work with Republicans to enact a conservative agenda – one which has been stalled this past couple weeks by vicious angry mob mentalities that think nothing of running roughshod over a man’s reputation, so long as the final result is a leftist win.”

Chumley continued: “Principles, true principles, are supposed to stand strong, withstand the winds, weather whatever storms come. They’re basic laws and truths – guiding lights in the dark. And think about it: Flake just admitted he has none. What’s worse, he did it with a schoolboy smile.”

Meanwhile, minutes after announcing that he had intended to vote to confirm Kavanaugh, Flake was confronted by two women who said they were sexual assault survivors and berated the senator for his choice to confirm Kavanaugh.

The women have been identified in reports as Ana Maria Archila and Maria Gallagher.

Archila is an executive director of the New York-based Center for Popular Democracy, which is heavily funded by George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.

Archila said to Flake: “What you are doing is allowing someone who actually violated a woman to sit on the Supreme Court. This is not tolerable.”

Gallagher told the visibly distraught Flake: “I was sexually assaulted and nobody believed me. I didn’t tell anyone, and you’re telling all women that they don’t matter, that they should just stay quiet because if they tell you what happened to them you are going to ignore them.”

Not long after the exchange, Flake said: “I think it would be proper to delay the floor vote for one week for an FBI investigation…limited in time to no more than one week. I will vote to advance the bill to the floor with that understanding, and I’ve spoken to a few members on my side of the aisle to delay the vote as well.” He said he would not support the final confirmation until an FBI investigation had been conducted.

Later asked if the confrontation had influenced his decision to call for an FBI probe, Flake said “no.”

Writing for National Review, columnist John Fund noted: Make no mistake. The Center for Popular Democracy is at the heart of the effort to stop Kavanaugh.”

Fund said a source forwarded to him an email from someone in the organization which read: “Last week, you saw protestors interrupting the Kavanaugh hearings, trying to slow it down and show the Judiciary Committee how much they/we care. Those protests were organized by the Women’s March and the Center for Popular Democracy and other groups.”

Fund noted that Archila “is also a member of the national committee of the Working Families Party (WFP), a New York-based fringe political party that exercises outside influence in the Empire State because of the state’s unique law allowing candidates to run on more than one party line.”

The WFP was founded in 1998 by the leaders of ACORN, the now disbanded and disgraced group of community organizers for whom Barack Obama served as a lawyer, in Chicago in the 1990s, Fund noted.


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