A media adviser that was working with the Republican majority on the Senate Judiciary Committee to get Supreme Court pick Brett Kavanaugh confirmed has resigned from his position after questions about claims of previous sexual harassment allegations against him. Garrett Ventry, 29, who served as a communications aide to the committee, stepped down after NBC News asked him about evidence that he had been fired from a previous job due to a sexual harassment claim against him.
NBC reported that Ventry had been fired a few months into a job as a social media adviser for North Carolina House Majority Leader John Bell in 2017. Sources told NBC News that Ventry had been fired because “parts of his resume were found to have been embellished, and because he faced an accusation of sexual harassment from a female employee of the North Carolina General Assembly’s Republican staff.” Ventry denied any past “allegations of misconduct” in a statement to NBC.
Ventry was also a former employee of CRC Public Relations, according to Politico that details how the powerful company played a key role in guiding conservative legal activist Ed Whelan on how to roll out a crazy conspiracy theory that was supposed to exonerate Kavanaugh. Whelan has since apologized and deleted the theory that he had laid out in a Twitter thread. Ventry began working for the committee after the Federalist Society called on the CRC to send someone over to assist the nomination process, reports Politico.
Even though Ventry “strongly denies allegations of wrongdoing, he decided to resign to avoid causing any distraction from the work of the committee,” Judiciary Committee Spokesman Taylor Foy said in a statement. But sources said Republican leaders became concerned that Ventry’s history meant he couldn’t be an effective spokesman for Kavanaugh’s nomination.
Ventry had appeared on Fox News just a few days ago to detail the efforts that had been made to get Christine Blasey Ford to testify about her claims that Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her at a party more than three decades ago when the two were in high school.