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Republican Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri has led a Twitter campaign attempting to slander Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson by accusing her of handing down lenient sentencing to those convicted in past child pornography cases.

During her confirmation hearing, Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois asked Jackson to tell the committee “what was going through your mind” when deciding sentencing for convicted pedophiles.

Jackson started by saying that “as a mother, and a judge who has had to deal with these cases, I was thinking that nothing could be further from the truth” regarding Hawley’s accusations.

“These are some of the most difficult cases that a judge has to deal with, because we’re talking about pictures of sex abuse of children, we’re talking about graphic descriptions that judges have to read and consider when they decide how to sentence in these cases, and there is a statute that tells judges what they’re supposed to do.” 

Jackson then explained to the committee that Congress decides the statute judges follow in cases like child pornography and the cases.

“And that statute, that statute doesn’t say look only at the guidelines and stop, the statute doesn’t say impose the highest possible penalty for this sickening and egregious crime,” Jackson said. “The statute says calculate the guidelines, but also look at various aspects of this offense and impose a sentence that is, doesn’t say impose the highest possible penalty for this sickening and egregious crime.” 

Jackson went on to explain that the exploited children’s voices and perspectives are represented in her sentencing.

“And what that means is that for every defendant who comes before me, and who suggests as they often do that they’re just a looker, that these crimes don’t really matter, they collected these things on the internet and it’s fine, I tell them about the victim’s statements that have come in to me as a judge,” she said. 

Jackson said in the past victims have told her “that they will never have a normal adult relationship” and they have gone into prostitution, started using drugs, or developed agoraphobia and been unable to leave the house.

Jackson also argued that in each of these cases, the perpetrators have received a significant sentence as well as all of the additional restraints provided by the law.

“These people are looking at 20, 30, 40 years of supervision. They can’t use their computers in a normal way for decades. I am imposing all of those constraints because I understand how significant, how damaging, how horrible this crime is,” she said.

A White House spokesman called out Hawley’s accusation and twitter slander as “toxic and weakly-presented misinformation that relies on taking cherry-picked elements of her record out of context — and it buckles under the lightest scrutiny.”