In a column by Post opinion writer Helaine Olen, she points out the “staggering hypocrisy” of Brett Kavanaugh.

He has said he doesn’t want to answer questions about his personal life, yet when he worked on the investigation of Bill Clinton, he zealously pursued prurient details about the relationship between Clinton and Lewinsky.

“Kavanaugh was not only a part of special counsel Ken Starr’s investigation into President Bill Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky; he was also one of the lead Torquemadas of it — zealous in the pursuit of his goal to the point of cruelty. If Kavanaugh’s nomination survives till Thursday’s scheduled Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, at least one senator should ask him why he thought it was so necessary to ask Clinton such graphic questions about Lewinsky.

“Let me be clear: Kavanaugh not only thought Clinton needed to be questioned about his relations with Lewinsky; he also wanted Clinton to be interrogated in the most detailed and specific way possible. He drew up a memo with a series of 10 sexually explicit questions about Clinton’s relationship with Lewinsky. He claimed he wanted to establish Clinton had no defense for his “pattern of behavior.” As a result, “[the] idea of going easy on him at the questioning is thus abhorrent to me,” Kavanaugh wrote in the summer of 1998.

“To say that the questions Kavanaugh came up with for Clinton were prurient doesn’t do justice to the gross invasiveness and detail he sought. These queries are of the sort that are even now uncomfortable to write out and list in a family newspaper, or discuss in mixed company. Sexual proclivities? “If Monica Lewinsky says you inserted a cigar into her vagina while you were in the Oval Office area, would she be lying?” and “If Monica Lewinsky says that you masturbated into a trashcan in your secretary’s office, would she [be] lying?”

“Starr’s team never asked such questions to Clinton in as specific a way as Kavanaugh drew up. Despite that, they remained, as Clinton put it at the time, “questions no American citizen would ever want to answer.” Those American citizens now apparently include Kavanaugh, who would rather not address his sexual past and apparently believes we should all honor that request.

“Please. The allegations made by Christine Blasey Ford and now Kavanaugh’s Yale classmate Ramirez do not, like Lewinsky and Clinton, involve two consenting adults. They are, instead, accusations of serious, nonconsensual sexual misconduct. They raise questions much more legitimate than the questions Kavanaugh would have had Clinton answer. They indicate, to use Kavanaugh’s own words, a possible “pattern of behavior.”

“Republican pols have long operated under a wildly generous the “do as I say, not as I do” standard, even as they castigate Democratic rivals for the tiniest infraction. When it comes to living up to the standards they would impose on others, Republicans escaped that accountability for so long that they appear blindsided when called to explain their actions. That Kavanaugh was pursuing Clinton and Lewinsky to a point of humiliation, while there was potentially much worse behavior in his own past, simply adds to gross hypocrisy on display.”