The negative reviews down at the other end of Pennsylvania Ave. were far more blunt, with one administration official calling the hearing a "disaster" for Kavanaugh's confirmation hopes. The official said Republican lawmakers made a mistake by hiring a woman out of fear of the optics of Ford being questioned by an unbroken line of old white men.

Trump allies who want to see Kavanaugh confirmed were concerned that Mitchell had not managed to poke any holes in Ford's account or character that would make her story less believable. But during the Judiciary Committee's lunch break, they were still holding out hope that her lines of questions would lead to a breakthrough finale.

"Rachel Mitchell not only is not laying a glove on her, but, in my view, is actually helping her credibility by the gentility with which these questions are being asked and the open-ended answers that the witness is being permitted to give" Trump ally and former Judge Andrew Napolitano said on Fox News. "The president cannot be happy with this."

As the hearing continued with testimony from Kavanaugh in the afternoon, Republicans soon pushed Mitchell aside. She asked a couple of a rounds of questions at the outset of the session, laying out a definition of sexual activity and asking if he'd ever engaged in such actions with Ford, which Kavanaugh denied.

Mitchell also asked him about drinking to the point of "black out," which he again denied. She may have actually done some damage to the nominee by beginning to question him about a party mentioned on his calendar which appeared to involve at least two people Ford identified as being at the event where she was attacked. But she never returned to complete that line of questioning.