Talk of the Campus: Embattled Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh has gone on the offensive, giving an interview to Fox News in which he denied accusations of sexual misconduct. “I know my lifelong record and I’m not going to let false accusations drive me out of this process,” he said.

He also said he couldn’t have sexually assaulted anyone because he was a virgin years into college.

It’s highly unusual for a court nominee to grant an interview and doing it with Fox declares which side of the partisan divide he lives on.

President Trump tweeted, “The Democrats are working hard to destroy a wonderful man, and a man who has the potential to be one of our greatest Supreme Court Justices ever, with an array of False Accusations the likes of which have never been seen before!”

Kavanaugh has repeatedly denied assaulting a 15-year-old girl while the two were in high school. He also denied the account of a woman who said Kavanaugh exposed himself to her during a drunken party at Yale. “I never did any such thing,” Kavanaugh said. “The other people alleged to be there don’t recall any such thing. If such a thing had happened, it would have been the talk of campus.”

An article in the New Yorker reports that it wasthe talk of at least some of the students. Deborah Ramirez, now 53, says she heard a male student shouting down the hallway about the incident moments after it happened. Another classmate told Ronan Farrow and Jane Mayer of The New Yorker that he was told of the incident within a day or two. The man said, “I’ve known this all along. It’s been on my mind all these years when his name came up. It was a big deal.”  The article says some of Kavanaugh’s classmates discussed the incident by email after he was nominated to the Court.

Reporters have dug into Kavanaugh’s yearbook from Georgetown prep in which he is listed as treasurer of the Keg City Club. He is also cryptically referred to has a “Renate Alumnius,” a reference to a girl named Renate at another school whose name appears 14 times in the book. Kavanaugh and other alumni say it only means they went on a date with Renate.

Spare the Rod: Deputy Attorney Gen. Rod Rosenstein went to the White Houseyesterday expecting to be fired and came away with his job intact, at least until Thursday when he is expected to have a face-to-face with President Trump.

Rosenstein is a frequent target of Trump’s ire over the Russia investigation.

A NY Times report that said Rosenstein considered secretly taping Trump to prove he’s unfit for office and invoking the 25^thAmendment to remove him put the President in a rage. But now he has to weigh the politics of firing the man who oversees the Russia investigation just six weeks before mid-term elections in which control of the House, and maybe even the Senate, is in play.

Rosenstein says he never did what the Times reported but Trump, who denounces everything the paper says about him, appears to believe it.

After the Deluge: Hurricane Florence is long gone, but floodwaters are still rising in South Carolina. In Georgetown County about 8,000 people have been advised to leave their homes. Thousands of homes and businesses are already in deep water.

Floods are also lingering in North Carolina  where400 roads are still closed but Interstate 95 was reopened Sunday night for the first time since the floods. At least 46 deaths are attributed to Florence.

The News Roundup: The Dallas Police Department has fired the female officer who entered the wrong apartment in her building and killed a 26-year-old unarmed black man in his own home. Amber Guyger has also been charged with manslaughter.  —A federal judge ordered endangered species protections restored to grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone National Park, countermanding the Trump administration which had de-listed them. The US Fish and Wildlife Service was planning its first licensed grizzly hunt inmore than 40 years. — A former Facebook employee is suing the company claiming that the company has not protected employees who review distressing material from suffering mental trauma. Facebook’s contract moderators are “bombarded” with “thousands of videos, images and livestreamed broadcasts of child sexual abuse, rape, torture, bestiality, beheadings, suicide and murder,” the lawsuit says.

The Business Page: SiriusXM, the satellite music service, is buying the Pandora, the streaming music company, in a $3.5 billion deal. Sirius has 36 million subscribers and Pandora claims 70 million active users. Pandora lost $221 million in the first half of the year, but the deal makes sense to the people who made it.

Foot Fault: Tennis star Andy Murray was handed a commemorative plate before competing in a tournament in China. He held it in its presentation box, tilted it slightly forward, and all you can hear on the video is the sound of shattering china. The plate, not the country.

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