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Senate Judiciary Committee Hears Testimony From Christine Blasey Ford And Kavanaugh

MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:

So much to unpack from today's testimony on Capitol Hill, where the hearing on the nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court has wrapped up. After competing accounts of what happened or didn't happen between two teenagers at a gathering decades ago, it is still not clear where we go from here.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

Judge Kavanaugh today repeatedly denied that he ever sexually assaulted anyone.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

BRETT KAVANAUGH: Throughout my 53 years and seven months on this earth, until last week, no one ever accused me of any kind of sexual misconduct - no one ever. A lifetime - a lifetime of public service and a lifetime of high-profile public service at the highest levels of American government and never a hint of anything of this kind. And that's because nothing of this kind ever happened.

CORNISH: Kavanaugh called the whole thing a grotesque and coordinated character assassination, one that will dissuade competent and good people from serving the country.

KELLY: The Senate Judiciary Committee began today by hearing from Christine Blasey Ford. She said she is 100 percent certain it was Kavanaugh who attacked her. And when asked by California Senator Dianne Feinstein how she could be so sure, she turned to her expertise as a psychologist.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

CHRISTINE BLASEY FORD: The same way that I'm sure that I'm talking to you right now. It's just basic memory functions and also just the level of norepinephrine and epinephrine in the brain that sort of, as you know, encodes - that neurotransmitter encodes memories into the hippocampus. And so the trauma-related experience then is kind of locked there whereas other details kind of drift.

DIANNE FEINSTEIN: So what you're telling us is this could not be a case of mistaken identity.

FORD: Absolutely not. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.

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