Kristof’s Kavanaugh Tweet Comes Back to Haunt Him (Update)

AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, File

    New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof may be watching his career implode. He claimed in a column that there was widespread sexual abuse against Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons, and that part of that abuse involved dogs raping prisoners.

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    The claim has caused widespread doubt and open ridicule. Kristof and the Times doubled and then tripled down on the claim, despite the fact that it has no credible witnesses and is disputed by journalists, politicians and dog lovers.

    The popular mystery novelist Drew Friedman resurfaced a column Kirstof wrote in 2018. In ”Would You Hire Brett Kavanaugh?”, Kristof shamed those who chose to “ignore serious, credible allegations and give a powerful man a pass, or will we at least try to ferret out the truth?” 

    Of course, Nicholas Kristof doesn’t care about the truth. I’ve written a lot on Hot Air and elsewhere about my targeting during the 2018 Kavanaugh nomination, and acknowledged the criticism that some have had that I write about it too much. My response has been the same: If bringing up Kavanaugh is a useful weapon to demoralize, discredit and ultimately destroy the Stasi media, I will do it. If writing about it one more time gets a few more people to open their eyes about the evil of people like Nicholas Kristof, it is time well spent. Not highlighting Kristof’s Kavanaugh tweet is like not recovering a fumble in a Super Bowl game. Too many conservatives passively accept the corruption of the media, not realizing that with tenacity and good journalism, we can actually put these people out of business.

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    This is not about me. It’s about making sure that Nicholas Kristof loses his job and is never taken seriously again. It happened to the Washington Post, it could happen to him.

    Here is the tweet Drew Friedman sent out:

Brett Kavanaugh, a man in his 50s, had been valedictorian of his high school, at Yale College and a star student at Yale Law, had clerked for the Supreme Court, had a top career as an appellate lawyer and federal judge and a pristine reputation, and then a random woman from the town he grew up in claimed he had groped her at a party 35 years earlier when they were in high school.  

Kavanaugh didn’t try to argue that the incident was consensual. He didn’t claim he remembered things differently than she did. He immediately stated that he had never even met the accuser. Denying ever meeting the accuser is a much stronger claim than merely denying assaulting her, and much easier to refute.  After Kavanaugh made this denial, Christine Blasey-Ford no longer had to prove he had sexually assaulted her to scuttle his nomination, she only had to prove that the two of them had attended a party together at which such an assault might have occurred.

She was unable to do so.  She did not know whose house the alleged assault occurred at.  None of the people she claimed attended the party corroborated any aspect of her account. Leland Keyser, a friend of Blasey-Ford’s, who the accuser claimed was at the alleged party, said she recalled no such event and had never met Kavanaugh.  

Kavanaugh produced a detailed calendar he had kept during the summer Blasey-Ford alleged she was assaulted, which included his whereabouts of every weekend night and listing who he was with. Kavanaugh argued that he could alibi himself and provide witnesses for any night Blasey-Ford claimed she might have been at a party with him. Blasey-Ford responded that she did not know the date of her assault and was not entirely certain it even occurred that year.  Instead of being seen as persuasive, Kavanaugh’s calendar was mocked in both mainstream and social media because the reason he kept it was for a drinking contest he was having with his friends.

Nearly a decade later, there is still not a single shred of proof or a single witness who will corroborate the claim that Brett Kavanaugh and Christine Blasey-Ford were ever in the same room before she testified at his confirmation hearing. Nonetheless, people like Nick Kristof still claim Kavanaugh was “credibly accused” of sexually assaulting this woman.

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    In 2025, I got a New York Times Kavanaugh reporter to apologize for his appalling coverage. (Had I given up and stood down, this never would have happened.) Nicholas Kristof and the Times have never expressed interest in my book The Devil’s Triangle. In a review of a leftist book about Kavanaugh, Times reviewer Alexandra Jacobs wrote that she “longs for more about Mark Judge.” (That’s longing is easy to satisfy - read the book I wrote.) In his recent book The Washington Book: How to Read Politics and Politicians, Post veteran Carlos Lozada reads all the books and other documents about Washington. These are political memoirs, government documents, Supreme Court decisions: “I read histories and manifestos,” Lozada writes. “I peruse centuries-old essays and decades-old commission reports. I scour Supreme Court decisions and the text of the latest congressional investigations. I read many books about American politics l, and, I must confess, I also read books by politicians and government officials.” Lozada reads campaign biographies, “revisionist memoirs,” the “tell-all books by mid-level administration staffers,” and books by “presidents, vice presidents, senators, chiefs of staff and FBI directors.” 

    If it has anything to do with D.C., Lozada reads it. Except The Devil’s Triangle, a book about one of the most dramatic political events in the history of D.C., written by a native.

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    Kristof, Lozada, the columnists, editors, PR people, and “fact checkers” - our media is a demon that for a century has tried to take possession of America’s soul. I’m not quitting until this legion is cast out.

Update (Ed): Our colleague and pal Brad Slager did a deeper dive on Kristof's 'sources' at our sister site RedState this morning for his podcast. Be sure to check it out, but here's the teaser:

There is all manner of alleged mistreatment, from beatings to sex assaults and…dog rapes. What there is no manner of is tangible evidence. Everything is based on first-person testimony, and nothing else. No documents, reports, corroboration, photos, medical files, or any other firm proof. Kristof includes supposedly valid studies from the U.N and a European group on the crimes – which are based entirely on the same type of verbal claims.

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Ed Morrissey 10:00 PM | May 13, 2026
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