Kavanaugh ally suggests his assault accuser confused him with a somewhat similar-looking classmate

Ed Whelan, president of the conservative Ethics and Public Policy Center think tank and a friend of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, used photographs of a stranger's home, Google Maps, floor plans from Zillow, old yearbook pages, and Facebook posts from 2012 to bolster his theory that Kavanaugh did not sexually assault his accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, in high school.

Whelan, an adviser to Kavanaugh's confirmation effort, dumped all this on Twitter Thursday evening. Ford had told The Washington Post that Kavanaugh tried to rape her in a Maryland house that was "not far from" the Columbia Country Club. She identified four people as being at the party, including Kavanaugh and his friend Mark Judge, but "none of the four lived in the vicinity of the Columbia Country Club," Whelan tweeted. (Kavanaugh, for the record, lived 3.6 miles away.)

Whelan then produced a photo of a home "barely a half-mile" from the club, along with the house's floor plan, and revealed that a classmate and friend of Kavanaugh's had lived there in the early 1980s. Sherlock Whelan described this man as a "good friend" of Judge's, produced side-by-side photos of Kavanaugh and the man, and said people "have commented on how much they resembled each other in appearance." He reasoned that the host of the party was most likely to use the upstairs.

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Although implying otherwise, Whelan said he's not insinuating that the man he publicly named and shared photos of did anything wrong, or that Ford is now "mistakenly remembering" this man as Kavanaugh.

Ford responded late Thursday, saying she knew and had "socialized" with both Kavanaugh and Whelan's Kavanaugh doppelgänger, and "there is zero chance I would confuse them." The Post said the man is now a middle school teacher, who, to no one's surprise, did not respond to requests for comment. A Senate Judiciary Committee staffer tweeted that the panel "had no knowledge or involvement" in Whelan's folly.