President Donald Trump, fighting to shore up his nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court in a divided U.S. Senate, on Tuesday called sexual misconduct allegations against the judge "a con game being played by the Democrats."
In a break from convention, Senate Judiciary Committee Republicans will use an outside lawyer at a high-stakes hearing on Thursday to question Christine Blasey Ford, a university professor who accused him of sexually assaulting her in 1982 when both were high school students in Maryland. Typically, senators themselves do the questioning.
In comments to reporters at the United Nations, Trump escalated his rhetoric in defense of Kavanaugh, a conservative federal appeals court judge whose nomination to a lifetime post on the high court has been imperiled by the decades-old allegations brought by Ford and another woman.