SEXUAL HARASSMENT Trump believes Alabama voters should decide
WASHINGTON — President Trump considers the allegations of sexual assault and misconduct against Republican Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore “extremely troubling” but doesn’t plan to rescind his endorsement of the former state judge and firmly believes that Alabama voters should be the ones to pick their next senator, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said on Thursday.
“The president believes that these allegations are very troubling and should be taken seriously, and he thinks that the people of Alabama should make the decision on who their next senator should be,” Sanders told reporters at a briefing.
Sanders said that if the accusations are true, the president wants Moore to drop out of the race, but she repeatedly declined to say whether the president believes the women who have accused Moore of abuse or misconduct. Sanders did say that the president “supported the decision” by the Republican National Committee earlier this week to pull funding from Moore’s race.
Trump has largely refrained from commenting on the allegations against Moore, who has been publicly accused of pursuing teenage girls when he was in his 30s, initiating a sexual encounter with a 14-yearold girl and sexually assaulting a 16-year-old girl about 40 years ago. Moore has denied all of these charges and has refused to drop out of the race.
Since returning late Tuesday, Trump has not mentioned Moore in any public comments or tweets, and he has ignored questions about Moore that reporters have shouted at him.
Ivanka Trump, the president’s daughter who works as an adviser in the White House, said earlier this week that “there’s a special place in hell for people who prey on children” and that she has “no reason to doubt the victims’ accounts,” although she has not called for Moore to drop out of the race.
During the Thursday briefing, Sanders was asked about allegations raised by several women during the campaign that Trump touched and kissed them without their consent. Trump has repeatedly denied these allegations, and Sanders recently said that the president continues to consider all of those women liars.
In an extensive report published last week, The Post detailed allegations that Moore initiated a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old girl nearly four decades ago when he was in his early 30s and that he pursued three other girls around the same time who were between the ages of 16 and 18.