Exactly six years ago this week, Susan Collins was impressed with the FBI's background check into Brett Kavanaugh. "It appears to be a very thorough investigation," the Republican said.

Yeah, about that...

Just two days before the Senate’s confirmation vote, with the FBI review ostensibly complete, Republican Sen. Susan Collins of Maine said it appeared to be “a very thorough investigation.”

That was exactly six years ago this week. Collins’ assessment seemed badly flawed at the time, but it looks considerably worse now. As my MSNBC colleague Clarissa-Jan Lim explained:

The Trump administration did not allow the FBI to conduct a full-scale investigation into the sexual misconduct allegations against Brett Kavanaugh that threatened his Supreme Court confirmation, according to a new report, disputing then-President Donald Trump’s public claims at the time.

In 2018, at the height of the controversy, the late-Sen. Dianne Feinstein — at the time, the Senate Judiciary Committee’s ranking member — said that the FBI’s report on Kavanaugh “looks to be a product of an incomplete investigation that was limited perhaps by the White House.”....

That, of course, was what the then-president had to say in public. In private, according to Whitehouse’s findings, the Trump administration not only “kneecap[ed] FBI investigators’ ability to adequately investigate those allegations, but the lack of transparency misled the Senate and the public about the investigation’s thoroughness.”

Kavanaugh and the FBI declined to comment, and the Trump campaign called the findings an “attempt to delegitimize the Supreme Court” (which, incidentally, the former president has tried to delegitimize.)

Speaking of the GOP candidate, the year after Trump left the White House, he said, in reference to Kavanaugh, “I saved his life. He wouldn’t even be in a law firm. Who would have had him? Nobody. Totally disgraced. Only I saved him. ... I saved his life, and I saved his career.”

It was a curious quote, which is now seen in a new light.