Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh said that he would be willing to speak with lawmakers to refute an allegation of physical and sexual assault by a woman who has come forward publicly with the accusation, CNN reports.

Said Kavanaugh: “This is a completely false allegation. I have never done anything like what the accuser describes — to her or to anyone. Because this never happened, I had no idea who was making this accusation until she identified herself yesterday. I am willing to talk to the Senate Judiciary Committee in any way the committee deems appropriate to refute this false allegation, from 36 years ago, and defend my integrity.”

According to multiple sources, Kavanaugh has also hired an attorney.

David Frum: “The Kavanaugh nomination will now be assessed by people all of whom voted for the presidential candidate who confessed to grabbing women. On present indications, the allegations against Kavanaugh will not to be assessed in any meaningful sense at all. But ‘assessed’ is the wrong word. They are not going to be assessed in any meaningful sense of that word. The Senate Judiciary Committee has already released a statement dismissing the allegations as unworthy of further attention, and in fact, as an abuse of the hearing process. The candidate has been vetted, there is nothing more to learn or say.”

“‘The American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice. Therefore, this vacancy should not be filled until we have a new president.’ So said Mitch McConnell about the Merrick Garland nomination nine months before the 2016 elections. It’s now less than eight weeks to elections that may remake the Senate. What’s the case that this group of men should be the one to speak for the American people about this nomination?”

“It will be not be easy to ascertain what happened all those years ago. It will not be much easier to judge the relevance of those events, whatever they were, to a confirmation vote 36 years later. But we can judge the judges — and they are the wrong men in the wrong job at the wrong time. This vote should be delayed until more facts are in, and until a broader public has made its voice heard.””

Debra Katz, the attorney for Christine Blasey Ford, who has accused Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexual assault in the 1980s, told NBC News that Ford believes the incident was “attempted rape” and is willing to testify publicly before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Said Katz: “She’s willing to do whatever it takes to get her story forth.”

Jonathan Swan: “Strategists advising Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh plan to use aggressive tactics this week in response to the public accusation of a ‘stumbling drunk’ sexual assault in high school that instantly imperiled his confirmation.”

“Some involved in the process are going to urge Senate leaders to call on the accuser — Christine Blasey Ford, who went on the record with The Washington Post‘s Emma Brown — to testify publicly this week, ahead of Thursday’s scheduled Judiciary Committee vote. This gambit basically bets that she will decline, and Republicans can then say that they tried to investigate further.”

“A source close to the process said that if Democrats sink Kavanaugh ‘we’ll just bring in someone moreconservative.'”

Debra Katz, Ford’s attorney, told CBS News that Senate Republicans intend to “play hard ball” with her client as they prepare to move ahead with Kavanaugh’s confirmation to the Supreme Court.

Playbook: “In normal times, Brett Kavanaugh would be under tremendous pressure to abandon his bid for a lifetime appointment to the Supreme Court. His accuser — Christine Blasey Ford — has spoken on the record, detailing allegations of sexual assault when they were in high school.”

“But, quite obviously, these are not normal times. And, as of now — that is, early Monday morning — Kavanaugh is still a nominee for the highest court in the land. Republicans say they are still weighing their options, and will figure out if there is a path forward today. (Yes, we are acutely aware that this entire situation can change at the drop of a hat.)”

“If you’re McConnell,  the squeaky-clean, fairly easy Supreme Court nominee just made life a lot more complicated. McConnell’s political legacy will be his dogged pursuit of getting more conservative justices. But McConnell knows his members as well as any political leader. If he gets the sense that this is too tough a vote for his members to take, he’s not going to go through with it. And he also certainly is not going to put up a SCOTUS vote that isn’t going to pass.”

Reason: “Some are making a big deal out of the fact that Christine Blasey Ford took a polygraph, and the allegation was deemed credible. This is actually a comparatively weak piece of evidence in Ford’s favor. Lie detectors can be gamed, and the scientific community is conflicted on their overall reliability.”

“But other circumstantial evidence gives some weight to Ford’s claims. Kavanaugh’s friend, Mark Judge, is a conservative commentator who strongly denied Ford’s accusation when it was made anonymously… Judge is also the author of two books that address his own alcoholism throughout his teen years — Wasted: Tales of a Gen X Drunk and God and Man at Georgetown Prep.”

Meanwhile, Mother Jones “suggests that Judge might simply not remember the incident in question. The article also draws attention to another passage from the Georgetown Prep book, in which Judge makes reference to friend, ‘Bart O’Kavanaugh,’ who ‘puked in someone’s car the other night’ and passed out on the way back from a party. And the Georgetown Prep yearbook entry for Kavanaugh makes reference to his membership in the ‘Keg City Club.'”

“That the teenage Kavanaugh was a notorious drinker and party boy while in high school does not confirm what Ford has said about him. But it does make it somewhat easier to believe Ford’s claim.”

Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) told the Washington Post that Christine Blasey Ford, who claims that Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh attempted to rape her while they were in high school, “must be heard” and urged the Senate Judiciary Committee not to vote on Kavanaugh’s nomination until it has a chance to hear more from her.

Said Flake: “I’ve made it clear that I’m not comfortable moving ahead with the vote on Thursday if we have not heard her side of the story or explored this further.”

Flake is one of the committee’s 21 members. Republicans hold a 11-to-10 majority on the panel.

Jonathan Swan: “Since the story broke, I’ve spoken to four sources close to the Kavanaugh confirmation process. All were defiant and sought to raise doubts about the accuser’s credibility and the holes in her story — though none were willing to do so on the record.”

Speaking publicly for the first time, Christine Blasey Ford said that one summer in the early 1980s, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh and a friend — both “stumbling drunk”  — “corralled her into a bedroom during a gathering of teenagers at a house in Montgomery County,” the Washington Post reports.

“While his friend watched, she said, Kavanaugh pinned her to a bed on her back and groped her over her clothes, grinding his body against hers and clumsily attempting to pull off her one-piece bathing suit and the clothing she wore over it. When she tried to scream, she said, he put his hand over her mouth.”

Also interesting: “She engaged Debra Katz, a Washington lawyer known for her work on sexual harassment cases. On the advice of Katz, who believed Ford would be attacked as a liar if she came forward, Ford took a polygraph test administered by a former FBI agent in early August. The results, which Katz provided to The Post, concluded that Ford was being truthful when she said a statement summarizing her allegations was accurate.”

The New Yorker has details of the sexual misconduct allegations made in a letter that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) referred to the FBI.

“The allegation dates back to the early nineteen-eighties, when Kavanaugh was a high-school student at Georgetown Preparatory School, in Bethesda, Maryland, and the woman attended a nearby high school. In the letter, the woman alleged that, during an encounter at a party, Kavanaugh held her down, and that he attempted to force himself on her. She claimed in the letter that Kavanaugh and a classmate of his, both of whom had been drinking, turned up music that was playing in the room to conceal the sound of her protests, and that Kavanaugh covered her mouth with his hand. She was able to free herself.”

“Although the alleged incident took place decades ago and the three individuals involved were minors, the woman said that the memory had been a source of ongoing distress for her, and that she had sought psychological treatment as a result.”

“As a White House lawyer in the Bush administration, Judge Brett Kavanaugh challenged the accuracy of deeming the Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade abortion rights decision to be ‘settled law of the land,'” according to a secret email obtained by the New York Times.

“The email, written in March 2003, is one of thousands of documents that a lawyer for President George W. Bush turned over to the Senate Judiciary Committee about the Supreme Court nominee but deemed ‘committee confidential,’ meaning it could not be made public or discussed by Democrats in questioning him in hearings this week.”

Wrote Kavanaugh: “I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land at the Supreme Court level since Court can always overrule its precedent, and three current Justices on the Court would do so.”

New York Times: “Welcome to the new reality of Supreme Court confirmation hearings — pandemonium, protesters and razor-sharp partisan lines. Thirty years of warfare over judicial nominations culminated on Tuesday in the chaotic beginning of Senate consideration of the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, a tumultuous 90-minute first act that no one in the hearing room had ever seen before in decades of such events. Democrats on the typically staid, decorous committee immediately interrupted Senator Charles Grassley, the Iowa Republican who leads the panel, as he opened the proceedings.”

Politico: “They’re the most junior Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee. But Kamala Harris and Cory Booker led the way in upending Brett Kavanaugh’s debut — and the GOP was watching with 2020 on its mind.”

“Hours before Brett Kavanaugh arrived for his Senate confirmation hearing on Tuesday, Chuck Schumer and frustrated fellow Democratic senators debated staging a mass walkout — or not showing up at all,” Politico reports.

”The strategy session revealed a divide on the Judiciary Committee between its more aggressive, often younger senators and veterans who prefer to adhere to the chamber’s norms. To bridge that gap, Democrats settled on a middle ground: Disruption.”