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Okay, I want to break down something about the Franken story: The allegations against him. In essence, there are three: The things Tweeden accused him of, the photo of him pretending to grope Tweeden, and the allegations from other women.
Jane Mayer makes a strong case that some of Tweeden's allegations against Franken were factually false, and that others were likely concocted or exaggerated. But this isn't news—it was widely believed even before Franken resigned.
If the only charges against Franken had been the uncorroborated claims lodged by Leeann Tweeden, he'd almost certainly still be in the Senate.
Second, there's the photo of Franken pretending to grope Tweeden. Mayer quotes friends of Franken saying he was joking around, pretending to be the kind of guy who would do what he was doing. Locker room stuff.
I find Franken's 2017 comments on the photo more compelling: "I don't know what was in my head when I took that picture, and it doesn't matter. There's no excuse. I look at it now and I feel disgusted with myself. It isn't funny. It's completely inappropriate."
"It's obvious how Leeann would feel violated by that picture ... how millions of other women would feel violated by it—women who have had similar experiences in their own lives, women who fear having those experiences, women who look up to me, women who have counted on me."
Mayer doesn't quote that statement in her piece, and indeed Franken seems to walk it back. But I think he got it right the first time.
Finally, there are the allegations from seven other women. Some are more serious than others, but we know from the piece that Franken had a tendency to be physical with strangers in ways that made his staff uncomfortable.
Specifically, we know that Franken was taken aside by a staffer in 2007, and warned about his habit of kissing women on the mouth. (Interestingly, Mayer tells us nothing about the context of this kiss, other than that it involved "a female acquaintance.")
(Though Franken acknowledges that he was warned about kissing women in 2007, and says that he—in Mayer's words—"became more careful after that," he also claims, contradictorily, "that he’d never heard any complaints about his behavior toward women" until 2017.)
Mayer suggests that a 2006 incident in which a Senate staffer alleges that Franken cornered her and tried to kiss her represented "a clumsy thank-you gesture," but nobody denies that it happened, or suggests that it's unlikely that he was attempting to kiss her (if platonically).
Finally, Mayer mentions an incident in which a woman alleges that Franken grabbed her ass during the taking of a photo. She makes no effort to dispute this account, and doesn't indicate that she asked Franken or his friends whether he's ever been known to grab people's butts.
So let's say that Franken hadn't resigned, and had faced an ethics investigation. Would he have been entirely exonerated? No. We know that we would not have been. We know that from his own words, and those of his friends.
He would have been made to apologize again for the photo, which he had already called "completely inappropriate," and which he had already said disgusted him.
He would have been faced with the testimony of at least half a dozen women—in all likelihood more, perhaps many more—who said that he had behaved inappropriately with them.
And he would have been asked a LOT of really unpleasant questions, including many that revolved around statements and actions that were on the public record.
So no. Mayer's report doesn't exonerate Franken, and it doesn't indicate that he would have been exonerated by an ethics committee investigation. It would have been ugly. And he would have emerged greatly diminished, even under the most generous possible reading of the facts.
And all that is in addition to the fact that—as I tweeted this morning—he had by the time of his resignation given his onetime allies in the Senate no basis on which to mount a defense of his behavior.
We know from Mayer's piece—as we knew already—that Gillibrand wasn't acting alone when she called on Franken to resign. She was speaking on behalf of a group of seven female senators.
And we know, as we've always known, that it took three weeks and eight accusers—including one personally known to several senators—for those calls for resignation to emerge.
Did Leanne Tweeden launch a partisan hit against Franken? Absolutely. Did she misrepresent the facts in doing so? Without question. But again, her allegations, in isolation, would almost certainly not have brought him down.
What brought him down was the photo, and the seven other accusers, and—crucially—his own refusal to offer a coherent defense, a sincere and plausible apology, or even a full and honest account of his own behavior. Over the course of three weeks.
