Outlawing "hate speech" & seemingly unrelated consequences.

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Well that's certainly Brett Kavanaugh's argument. He took the defamatory route. His lawyers were comfortable because Blasey-Ford's testimony alone was not sufficient, one of the reasons is that police require evidence of assault if its not caught on camera (so semen, bruises etc). Again the time elapsed was not favourable to the plaintiff.

true but FOI is not automatic and even when documentation is requested under FOI the FBI can redact information. An exception might be if the court subpoenaed documentation but they did not because they did not feel the FBI held anything justifiable to re-open the case.

Nor was the fact the 3 people she had claimed were at the party had any recollection of it, nor various other inconsistencies in her story...

The fact that she refused to supply the "therapy notes" to congress or the FBI, despite them reportedly being "crucial" to her case also works against her accusations, sadly (not saying this didn't happen (or that at the very least she believes it happened), but withholding crucial information from investigators is not a good look...).

Its possible (again I am only speculating) that she felt sharing the therapy notes would be a breach of privacy. For one thing it may trigger her PTSD from the event especially if it was shared in court.

That is somewhat hard to believe, considering she had already shared it (or at least selected passages\her "summary" claiming it to be the notes) with a major newspaper, which initiated the investigation.

If she was willing to allow the information to be widely published (why else communicate it with a newspaper), I fail to see why sharing this same information with the FBI or congress to allow them to investigate more fully wouldn't occur, have different "privacy" implications, or trigger "PTSD".

Again, not saying this isn't the reason, but it doesn't seem logical to me.

Technically it does breach patient-therapist confidentiality, it does strike me as strange that Kavanaugh's lawyers never tried to subpoena her therapy notes if they were so confident? but I guess they didn't want to open that door.

Patient-therapist confidentiality is designed to protect the patient, not the therapist, so that doesn't really assist her case.

As to Mr. Kavanaugh's lawyers not subpoena'ing the records: Why should they specifically have to? Being that they were a core part of the initial claim, it was the job of the "prosecution" to supply them.

Subpoena's are generally used to get all information related to a certain thing, not specific, individual documents (potentially they could be included\covered by the requested items, such as a subponea for "all records, documents, communications, etc. related to..."), in order to gain all records, not just the ones that someone is aware of (in order to ensure the person sending the subpoena gets anything both favorable or otherwise from the person receiving it, rather than just what one party wants the other to see/know). This in one reason many cases end with a settlement before the "discovery" stage...they may believe they are "innocent", but information requested (or potentially being requested) may be worth more being hidden from the public than the "settlement" cost would be.

I think that's the point, none of this extra information would have helped her case (she probably knew) and conversely Kavanaugh's lawyers had already made their case successfully. It all boiled down to her testimony only. It was not enough.

I keep referring back to Bill Cosby's case because of none of the 60 women were able to make a case (despite the overwhelming reasons) because it was just relying on their testimony only. Cosby dug his own grave by volunteering to say he gave the last one (Constandt) Quaaludes.

Kavanaugh (despite his weird emotional outbursts) kept to the script.

Actually, she did say that she would release the notes to the FBI when they interviewed her.
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/409760-attorneys-for-kavanaugh-accuser-fbi-will-receive-therapy-notes-if-it-agrees

But the FBI did not even interview her.
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/fbi-kavanaugh-investigation-over-no-interview-dr-christine-blasey-ford

Doesn't that sound weird?

Thanks for that. Yes the FBIs conduct seemed like political pressure to not rock the boat.

Very...I'd expect a person to hand over the notes in advance, so the investigators know what they need to ask about to clarify their contents, not having to read through them and ask questions at the same time, potentially missing important information\details in the process. With the notes, they can also determine questions for other interviews as well, including people who otherwise would have been interviewed prior to the notes being available.

Normal investigations generally consist of gathering evidence (in this case the notes), then interviewing...

The very reasonable explanation is that she might want to give her own context to focus on the parts that were relevant, rather than leaving whoever to just burry things and instead just use parts to smear her.

That does not even explain why they did not interview her. Other than the fact that the investigation was infamously limited in scope to pretend that it would at things but not enough to find anything substantial. And lets be clear that this was not even part of a criminal prosecution but to see if his character was questionable to become a supreme court judge, which there was plenty of evidence of.

And she could still give her own "context" when she is interviewed...But the investigation can focus on the notes as a whole, not just the parts that one party finds favourable, or has a preference for (or avoiding "bad" sections).

Otherwise, the person supplying the notes could try to direct people away from any information which may be at odds with the "preferred" area of focus, or even contradict this, which is precisely why the the notes are needed before the interview.

I'm not saying that this is the case here, instead I am trying to explain why "providing the notes when interviewed" is not the process that is (or should be) taken in any investigation.

The Whitehouse never had any intention of letting the FBI interview her, they said that the testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee was enough, something that they could control the narrative of and not be required to actually consider anything specific.
https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/409746-fbi-doesnt-have-approval-to-talk-to-ford-or-kavanaugh-for

At which point, wouldn't it be logical to take all "evidence" (such as the notes) to the FBI in order to try and force a more in-depth investigation?

If it was a serious as it was reported, and the notes were so extensive regarding this, the decision to refrain from bringing them forward becomes even more suspicious.

If someone is happy to go to the media with a story (and "evidence"), yet unwilling to provide the information to those responsible for investigating\prosecuting these types of issues, it does not do anything good for the credibility of their claims...And they can't then complain about not having been interviewed if they haven't ensured the material to be interviewed about was already in the hands of the appropriate party.

To put it in simple terms...
When aplying for an interview for a job, do you make an appointment, turn up, THEN hand over your resume, etc. or do you provide the resume in advance so that the interviewers can prepare accordingly? Almost every other interview follows the same basic framework - receive information, study information, makes notes on information, THEN ask person to come in for interview.

You can't complain about the final step not happening if you haven't cleared the first step, nor blame the potential interviewrs for not providing an interview if you won't provide (in advance) the information to be interviewed about.

I don't think that you were paying attention to what was happening during that time. The White House was literally smothering the whole thing by making the FBI not investigate it by Trump treating the Department of Justice like his personal lawyer. Trump was openly mocking her at his rallies, and I don't think that you are in place to say what she should have done, just throw all of her personal information out there if the actual law could not take it seriously. They only created the illusion that it was. During the whole event they pretended that there would be plenty of time to discuss it with all the facts, and then after the hearing they just said it was all cleared up despite that they did not even want any witnesses called.

Some of you seem to think that it would be front page and so in the face that it could not be denied, but happened and no one paid attention as we on the Left pointed it out that there is a huge imbalance of how allegations are treated. Not that supposed Left incumbents don't play the game too where they paid no attention to the accusation against Biden while the progressives had been trying to say it as loud as possible, and then acted like the accusations came out of nowhere.

To try and pull this back to the topic of the original topic, the Right has much more nefarious methods for controlling what the discussion is in politics, to control the freedoms of people that would be the targets of hate speech, and is pretty much creating bogeyman out of the ideas laws to stop hate speech. There is no evidence that putting them into place will stop topics from being discussion, just as conservative groups will obfuscate and pretend that the real topic is about decorum, if the person on the Left said a bad word or the protestors are not protesting in the exact way they should be.