Corker: Roy Moore ‘a bridge too far’
WASHINGTON — Sen. Bob Corker is the latest Senate Republican to publicly criticize Roy Moore amid allegations the controversial GOP Senate candidate from Alabama engaged in sexual misconduct.
“Look, I’m sorry, but even before these reports surfaced, Roy Moore’s nomination was a bridge too far,” Corker, R-Tenn., wrote Saturday on Twitter. Sen. Lamar Alexander added his voice to the chorus of criticism against Moore on Thursday, shortly after the allegations against Moore surfaced in a report by The Washington Post.
“If these disturbing allegations are true, Roy Moore should withdraw from the Senate race,” Alexander, R-Tenn., said in a statement.
Four women told The Post last week that Moore groped, kissed, or otherwise pursued them when they were teenagers in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The women, who spoke on the record to the Post, said Moore asked them out on dates while serving as an assistant district attorney in Gadsden, Ala. One woman, Leigh Corfman, said she was 14 in 1979 when Moore, then 32, undressed her, groped her and had her touch him, though they did not have intercourse.
The story quotes two other women who said Moore took them on dates when they were 16 and 17, and a third who said Moore bought her wine when she was 18, below the legal drinking age in the state at the time.
Moore denies the allegations and has called them “fake news.”
Moore, a former chief justice, will face off against Doug Jones, a former U.S. attorney, in a Dec. 12 special election for the Senate seat Jeff Sessions gave up to become President Donald Trump’s attorney general.
Moore beat Sen. Luther Strange, who was appointed to fill the seat after Sessions’ departure, in a Republican primary in September,
even though Trump supported Strange.
Following the Post report, a number of prominent Republicans, including Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, said Moore should drop out of the Senate race if the allegations against him are true.
During his time on the Alabama Supreme Court, Moore was twice suspended for misconduct.
The Alabama Court of the Judiciary removed him as a justice in 2003 because he refused to remove a Ten Commandments monument from the state judicial building. Voters later re-elected him as chief justice after he lost a race for governor.
In September 2016, the Court of the Judiciary suspended him for the rest of his term as chief justice, saying his refusal to follow federal rulings on same-sex marriage was a violation of judicial ethics.
USA Today contributed to this story.