"Senate Republicans thought that bringing a female prosecutor to question Christine Blasey Ford would help them avoid looking like they were ganging up on an alleged victim of sexual assault.
" But once the hearing was underway, they seemed to quickly regret outsourcing their work to former sex crimes prosecutor Rachel Mitchell. She lasted through the first part of the hearing featuring Ford, but was quickly relegated to the sidelines once Brett Kavanaugh started testifying, never to be heard from again.
"At the outset of the hearing, Mitchell's seemingly picayune lines of questioning failed to dent Ford's credibility and put Republicans on the defensive over the sexual abuse allegations against Kavanaugh. The five-minute rounds of questioning — a request from Ford's legal team that not every Democrat was comfortable with initially — didn't help the GOP's cause, either. Mitchell couldn't establish any rhythm, clearly frustrating Republicans.
"I haven’t seen the whole thing, but I wish our counsel had a longer period of time rather than breaking it up into five-minute segments,” said Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.). “It’s just chopped up [so] you don’t have … a really good fact-finding type of exchange. That’s been unfortunate.”
"During a lunch break a little more than halfway through Ford’s testimony, some Senate Republicans expressed concern on the chamber floor over where Mitchell was going with her questioning, according to a GOP senator present for the exchange. They were told that Mitchell was not trying to score points against Ford, but that she would put together a case that Republicans could lay out Friday during the committee vote on Kavanaugh.
"The No. 2 Senate Republican, Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas, said Mitchell was doing “very well” midway through her questioning of Ford, crediting the prosecutor with asking "respectful questions and [getting] pertinent information." But Cornyn acknowledged that the format was “a little awkward with five-minute rounds.”
"Despite Cornyn's claim that Mitchell performed well, she asked only two rounds of questions of Kavanaugh and then was effectively yanked by Republican senators who chose not to cede more of their time to her." . . .
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