Lawmakers rebuke Trump for mocking accuser

WASHINGTON:

Three Republican senators key to Brett Kavanaugh’s approval to the US Supreme Court blasted Donald Trump for mocking the woman accusing his nominee of sexual assault, as he played to a crowd of thousands at a political rally.

Still undecided on backing the conservative judge – whose appointment to the crucial, lifelong post has fuelled a bitter partisan clash – Senator Susan Collins weighed in to denounce the president’s comments ridiculing Christine Blasey Ford as “just plain wrong”.

The Kavanaugh controversy comes ahead of November congressional elections in which Trump’s Republican Party will battle to keep control of Congress.

Senator Lisa Murkowski called Trump’s speech “wholly inappropriate” and “unacceptable” while Senator Jeff Flake, the third Republican swing vote, said there was “no time and no place for remarks like that”.

“To discuss something this sensitive at a political rally is just not right. I wish he hadn’t done it. It’s kind of appalling,” Flake said.

The stern lawmaker reactions raised fresh doubts over the fate of Kavanaugh, as the Federal Bureau of Investigation reviews allegations by three women that the appeals court judge drank heavily and engaged in sexually abusive behaviour while he was a student in the 1980s.

The FBI was last Friday given a week to probe the accusations – with a vote in the Senate pushed back accordingly – but top lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary Committee said they now expected the investigators to report back as early as Wednesday.

Trump stirred the furious backlash when, at a Mississippi election rally late Tuesday, he ridiculed Blasey Ford’s accusation that Kavanaugh drunkenly tried to rape her in 1982, when both attended elite private high schools in suburban Washington.

The White House denied that Trump had derided the university professor.

“The president was simply stating facts that Dr Ford herself laid out in her testimony,” spokesman Sarah Sanders said. —