Jeff Flake Explains Himself

Jeff Flake barely slept the night before he upended the battle for the Supreme Court.   

The Arizona senator had spent days agonizing over what to do with the explosive allegation that Judge Brett Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted a young woman when he was in high school. For hours on Thursday, Flake—a key Republican swing vote—listened intently to raw testimony from the accuser and the accused, searching for something like certainty. But when it was over, he felt he was no closer to knowing for sure what happened in that suburban-Maryland bedroom 35 years ago.

The next morning, Flake’s office announced that, given the lack of corroborating evidence, the senator was prepared to move forward with Kavanaugh’s confirmation—but in private, he remained