Trump defends Moore amid scandal
GOP candidate ‘totally denies’ sexual allegations, president stresses
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump gave a boost Tuesday to embattled Republican candidate Roy Moore in the Alabama Senate race, warning against a Democratic victory and emphasizing that the former judge “totally denies” allegations of inappropriate relationships with teenage girls.
“We don’t need a liberal person in there, a Democrat,” Trump said about Moore’s opponent, former federal prosecutor Doug Jones, who has led in some recent polls in the state. “I’ve looked at his record. It’s terrible on crime. It’s terrible on the border. It’s terrible on military.”
The comments came after a week in which other Republican leaders in Washington, including Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had cut ties with Moore and called on him to exit the race. They also stood in contrast to Trump’s own support for the Republican National Committee’s decision last week to pull resources from the state, including 14 paid staffers and expertise in using party data to target voters and model the election result.
There were no signs Tuesday that the RNC would reverse course, but a senior administration official said the president’s comments could prompt a larger effort to close ranks behind Moore.
“Normally there would be an outside group dump-
ing $2 or $3 million attacking Doug Jones’ record,” the official said after the president spoke. “And now that the president has warned against having a liberal Democrat in that seat, that could be taken as signal to the outside groups.”
Trump spoke as sexual harassment and abuse scandals continued to roil the nation’s political landscape. In Congress, new allegations of harassment emerged against Rep. John Conyers, DMich., and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., released a statement calling for an ethics investigation of the matter. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., also faces an ethics probe after admitting to grabbing at the chest of a woman for a photograph while she slept before he was in Congress.
Trump — who during the presidential campaign was accused by 11 women of unwanted touching or kissing and was caught on tape boasting of grabbing women’s genitals without their consent — declined to comment directly on the allegations against Conyers or Franken but said he was happy that the misbehavior was becoming public.
“A lot of things are coming out, and I think that’s good for our society, and I think it’s very, very good for women, and I’m very happy a lot of these things are coming out, and I’m very happy it’s being exposed,” he said on the South Lawn of the White House before leaving for Florida, where he will spend Thanksgiving.
Moore campaign responds
Just before the president spoke, the Moore campaign issued a statement in Montgomery, saying they had evidence that cast doubt on the allegations of Leigh Corfman, who says she was touched sexually by Moore when she was 14 and he was in his 30s. The evidence they presented did not contradict Corfman’s story.
Ben DuPre, a longtime aide to Moore, displayed documents he said were from the Corfman family’s divorce file. The Post had obtained and reviewed a copy of the divorce file before publishing Corfman’s story. He noted that her parents had concerns at the time, following a divorce, regarding Leigh’s behavioral problems, a fact that is not contested.
DuPre also claimed that Corfman lived nearly a mile away from the intersection of Alcott Road and Riley Street in Gadsden, Ala., where she says Moore picked her up. It was not clear what address DuPre was referring to. Corfman and her mother told the Post they lived on Whittier Street, which is just around the corner from the alleged pickup point.
The RNC broke ties with Moore on Nov. 14 as the president was returning from Asia. There was, however, some disagreement inside the administration at the time about the best path forward. “All the right political people were not read into that decision,” said the senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
White House Chief of Staff John Kelly knew about the decision and was part of the discussion. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders later said the president supported the decision.
But over the past week, the White House position began to change. In a “Fox & Friends” interview Monday morning, presidential counselor Kellyanne Conway tacitly supported Moore by talking about the importance of keeping Jones, whom she cast as a “doctrinaire liberal,” from winning Alabama’s Senate seat — a message that was deliberate, one White House official said.
Conway alerted Trump in advance that she planned to make the argument against Jones, and the president agreed, saying he was eager to see what the response was, the official said.
White House aides also realized that Trump had come around to that approach — stressing the importance of keeping the seat in Republican control — when he began making the argument privately.
Jones’ ad uses Republicans
Democrats have dominated the broadcast airwaves in Alabama for weeks, spending more than seven times as much as Moore on television and radio ads, according to a Democrat and a Republican tracking the ad data.
The latest ad by Jones plays back criticism of Moore that Ivanka Trump, Attorney General Jeff Sessions and Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., gave in the aftermath of allegations that Moore made unwanted advances on teenage girls.