whitlock matt spox

There’s some evidence in the public domain backing up Schmidt’s speculation. On Tuesday, we learned that Kavanaugh had met privately with Hatch, who serves on the Judiciary Committee, and told him the accusations could be a case of mistaken identity. Whelan amplified this defense on his Twitter feed. On Wednesday, Hatch’s spokesperson, Matt Whitlock, retweeted another Whelan tweet promoting a mistaken identity theory, telling people to “keep an eye on Ed’s tweets the next few days.” (After Whelan’s thread came out, Whitlock deleted the tweet and denied having any foreknowledge of what Whelan was planning.)Then on Thursday evening, the Washington Post reported that the “mistaken identity” argument was a central plank of the planned Kavanaugh defense against the Ford allegations. It’s not clear in the story whether the plan was to simply say it was someone else, or to point the finger at a specific person as Whelan did:Kavanaugh and his allies have been privately discussing a defense that would not question whether an incident involving Ford happened, but instead would raise doubts that the attacker was Kavanaugh, according to a person familiar with the discussions.