When the father of a school shooting victim held out his hand to Donald Trump’s nominee for the supreme court on Tuesday, Judge Brett Kavanaugh looked at him, then turned without saying a word and walked out.
“I put out my hand and I said: ‘My name is Fred Guttenberg, father of Jaime Guttenberg, who was murdered in Parkland,’ and he walked away,” Guttenberg said in an interview with the Guardian.
The moment was captured in dramatic photographs, as well as on video from several different angles. In a statement after the incident, a White House spokesman said that “an unidentified individual” had approached Kavanaugh as he was preparing to leave for the confirmation hearing’s[1] lunch break and that “before the Judge was able to shake his hand, security had intervened”.
“If you watch the video, you see that’s not the case, ” Guttenberg said. “What the White House said was not true.”
Kavanaugh made eye contact with him “long enough for me to say who I was”, Guttenberg said. “He could have absolutely shook my hand and said: ‘I’m sorry for your loss.’ I mean – if nothing else.”
In an email, the White House spokesman Raj Shah wrote: “I stand by my tweet/email on this topic,” when asked about video of the interaction[2] that appears to contradict the White House’s claim that security had intervened “before the Judge was able to shake [Guttenberg’s] hand”.
Kavanaugh, a champion of gun rights, has been backed by the National Rifle Association, which announced in August that it was spending at least $1m on a national advertising campaign to support the judge’s confirmation to the supreme court.
In the video advertisement released
