Swetnick referral: Will Avenatti self-immolate?

Charles Grassley, oftime GOP toady and officially the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has referred barratry-flirting, IRS-wanted and ethics-challenged celebrity attorney Michael Avenatti to AG Jeff Sessions asking for a perjury investigation re sworn info Avenatti presented to his committee.

So, is this "basta" for Basta? I think it could be, and if nothing else, it again leads me to invoke Idries Shah:

To 'see both sides' of a problem is the surest way to prevent its complete solution. Because there are always more than two sides.

This is obviously something that's not two-siderism, but let's look at how the two-sider world is playing it out.

First, given that Grassley et al did not fully investigate all allegations against Brett Kavanaugh, a very apparent liar, this seems like straining at gnats at best. Wingnut Twitter applauded, while at least some sections of Resistance Twitter acted like this:

GOP Senate Judiciary Chair Grassley made a criminal referral over Julie Swetnick's allegations against Brett Kavanaugh her legal counsel @MichaelAvenatti.

Now, the FBI will HAVE to interview Kavanaugh.

Law of Unintended Consequences.#ThursdayThoughts https://t.co/MEVKxJWumE

— Grant Stern (@grantstern) October 25, 2018

Not so fast. If the actual FBI "investigation" was carefully scripted and controlled, what makes you think this will be different, especially when Avenatti, not Kavanaugh, is the focus?

Second, as for the allegations that Grassley states, on the surface, Avenatti and Swetnick appear on thin ice. Here's the nutgraf, from page 5:

Not only did Ms. Swetnick materially contradict the allegations of sexual misconduct she and Mr. Avenatti made to the Committee about Judge Kavanaugh, there is simply no credible evidence that Ms. Swetnick ever even met or socialized with Judge Kavanaugh. On the contrary, there is substantial evidence they did not know each other.

Well, that might be hard to prove one way or the other, but just throwing that in there makes it look both like Grassley will play hardball and that he had things to play hardball with.

That's backstopped by this:

Ms. Swetnick did eventually provide NBC News the names of four people she said attended these alleged parties with her, but according to NBC: “One of them said he does not recall a Julie Swetnick. Another of the friends she named is deceased. We’ve reached out to the other two, and haven’t heard back.”

Well, "goes to credibility, your honor."

Add in things like the AP piece profiling her right after Avenatti went public. The rest of the Grassley referral complaint digs into her non-Kavanaugh issues background, expanding on that AP story, as well as expanding on the links in the first paragraph.

As I noted at the time, her past legal issues don't mean that Kavanaugh didn't sexually assault her. They do mean, though, that any story she would tell would be horrible and immediately attacked. Beyond that, there's the redder flag that, in the one suit, she was allegedly the sexual harasser herself. A second suit has the air of gold-digger about it and more. In all of this, and in Avenatti's tissue-thin denials, the air of the gold-digger grows ever larger around him, too.

Per Watergate, I think we're at "credibility gap."

And, per Time's new piece, curious what Avenatti does with people just handing him campaign donations on the street. Just stuff them in his pocket? And, are this many people that anti-Trump drunk and desperate?

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OOPS, and real problems. Beyond politics in the narrow sense. If there's any fire behind the smoke, Avenatti's Nov. 14 arrest on a charge of felony-level domestic violence has finished cooking his political goose.