FOX NEWS:
Lawyers for Christine Blasey Ford, the California professor accusing Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her more than three decades ago, on Wednesday released the results of a polygraph examination she took Aug. 7 — but a key detail in the report appears to contradict Ford’s past claims.
The examination, which was administered by former FBI agent Jeremiah Hanafin, took place in a Hilton hotel in Maryland, according to a “Polygraph Examination Report” compiled by Hanafin.
Hanafin first allowed Ford and attorney Lisa Banks to meet alone to formulate a handwritten statement that Ford signed and provided Hanafin when he returned to the room. Then, without Banks present, Hanafin interviewed Ford about the night of the alleged assault, according to the report.
In the handwritten statement, Ford writes that “there were 4 boys and a couple of girls” at the party.
But in Ford’s letter to Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., in July, Ford gave a different tally, writing that the gathering “included me and 4 others.”
The total number of people at the purported party, and their genders, has been a key area of focus for Senate Republicans investigating Ford’s claims. Ford told The Washington Post last week that there were a total of “four boys at the party” where the alleged episode occured, and that two — Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge — had been in the room during her attack. (According to The Post, Ford told her therapist in 2012 that four boys were in the room with her during the alleged attack — a disparity she has blamed on her therapist’s recording of her statements).
All of the witnesses Ford has identified at the party, including Kavanaugh, Judge, and another classmate, Patrick Smyth, have denied knowledge of the alleged assault under penalty of felony in statements to the Judiciary Committee.
However, a woman, Leland Ingham Keyser, a former classmate of Ford’s at the Holton-Arms all-girls school in Maryland, has since been identified by Ford as the fourth witness at the party. In a dramatic twist, Keyser emerged Saturday night to say she doesn’t know Kavanaugh or remember being at the party with him.
The polygraph exam consisted of only two “relevant” questions: “Is any part of your statement false?” and “Did you make up any part of your statement?” (Ordinarily examiners ask a series of irrelevant questions to establish a baseline physiological response, which helps detect deception when relevant questions are asked, experts tell Fox News.)
The test measured “thoracic and abdominal respiration, galvanic skin response, and cardiac activity,” Hanafin wrote in the report.
The former FBI agent then ran the results of Ford’s two “no” responses through three separate scoring algorithms, including one developed by Johns Hopkins University. All three algorithms concluded that Ford’s responses did not indicate apparent deception, with one putting the probability that she was lying at .002 and another putting it at less than .02.
