Fox News host Sean Hannity walked back his original remarks insinuating that the five women accusing Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore (R) of sexual assault when they were teenagers might be lying, Politico reports.
Said Hannity: “For me, the judge has 24 hours. You must immediately and fully come up with a satisfactory explanation for your inconsistencies that I just showed.”
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell “deepened his bid to persuade Roy Moore to drop out of the race for an open Alabama Senate seat after accusations the Republican candidate engaged in sexual misconduct with teenage girls,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
McConnell “suggested he wanted Attorney General Jeff Sessions to run as a write-in candidate instead for his old seat, and he said that if Alabama voters elect Mr. Moore in the Dec. 12 vote, he would immediately face an ethics investigation.”
Meanwhile, the Daily Beast reports Steve Bannon “is keeping the door open to ditching” Moore.
Cook Political Report: “It’s hard to know whether Moore can or will win the special election. What we do know is that there is so much uncertainty surrounding the vote that moving the race to the Toss Up is the best way to describe where this race is today.”
Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) told the Birmingham News that he is sticking with Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore in the wake of sexual misconduct allegations, arguing that the conservative agenda is “vastly more important” than the claims against Moore.
Said Brooks: “Who will vote in America’s best interests on Supreme Court justices, deficit and debt, economic growth, border security, national defense, and the like? Socialist Democrat Doug Jones will vote wrong. Roy Moore will vote right. Hence, I will vote for Roy Moore.”
He added: “I do believe this, there are millions of people in America who would lie in a heartbeat if it meant adding another Democrat to the Senate.”
Playbook: “Expulsion takes a while. It’s tricky. The Senate hasn’t expelled a member in more than a century. But is there an argument to be made that Republicans would be better off electing Moore, expelling him and getting Alabama’s Republican governor to appoint another GOP senator? That way two Republicans don’t split the vote. And Republicans get to actually take action to expel someone whose behavior they say they find abhorrent.”
“If the Senate has to expel Moore, it could tear the party apart even further and embolden Steve Bannon in his war against incumbents. And it could look like the Senate is subverting the will of the voters.”
“By the way, remember: November was supposed to be all about tax reform. Republicans don’t want to be talking about whether their Senate candidate in Alabama had an unusual interest in high school girls.”
“About a dozen national party staffers are on the ground in Alabama, handling field organizing duties for next month’s special election between Moore and Democratic nominee Doug Jones,” an RNC official told BuzzFeed News.
New Yorker: “This past weekend, I spoke or messaged with more than a dozen people—including a major political figure in the state—who told me that they had heard, over the years, that Moore had been banned from the mall because he repeatedly badgered teen-age girls. Some say that they heard this at the time, others in the years since. These people include five members of the local legal community, two cops who worked in the town, several people who hung out at the mall in the early eighties, and a number of former mall employees.”
Blake Usry is quoted by the Birmingham News: “He would go and flirt with all the young girls. It’d seem like every Friday or Saturday night you’d see him walking around the mall, like the kids did.”
NRSC Chairman Cory Gardner (R-CO) said that Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore (R) is “unfit to serve,” and he should be expelled from the Senate if he wins next month’s election, following allegations that he initiated a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old girl when he was 32, the Washington Post reports.
The urgent repudiation came just hours after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said Moore should end his Senate campaign in Alabama.
A fifth woman accused Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore (R) of making sexual or romantic advances toward her when she was 16 years old, the New York Times reports.
Said Beverly Young Nelson: “I tried fighting him off, while yelling at him to stop, but instead of stopping, he began squeezing my neck attempting to force my head onto his crotch.”
She added: “I continued to struggle. I was determined that I was not going to allow him to force me to have sex with him. I was terrified. He was also trying to pull my shirt off. I thought that he was going to rape me. I was twisting and struggling and begging him to stop. I had tears running down my face.”
Nelson said that Moore warned her that “no one will believe you” if she told anyone about the encounter.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) said that Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore (R) should leave the race, Politico reports.
Said McConnell: “I think he should step aside. I believe the women, yes.”
“An Alabama woman is expected to disclose allegations of sexual assault against Roy Moore during a press conference today in New York,” the Birmingham News reports.
“New York Attorney Gloria Allred is holding a press conference at 2:30 p.m. EST with the new accuser, whose name hasn’t been made public. The woman alleges that Moore, Alabama’s Republican candidate for U.S. Senate, assaulted her when she was a minor.”
From the Times Daily of Florence, Alabama:
A former colleague of GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore said that it was “common knowledge” that the Alabama Republican dated high school girls when he worked in the Etowah County District Attorney’s Office in the 1980s, The Hill reports.
Said Teresa Jones: “It was common knowledge that Roy Moore dated high school girls, everyone we knew thought it was weird. We wondered why someone his age would hang out at high school football games and the mall… but you really wouldn’t say anything to someone like that.”
Politico: Moore backers stand by their man.
Roy Moore’s brother compared the U.S. Senate candidate to Jesus Christ in an interview, saying that the Alabama Republican is being persecuted “like Jesus” in the wake of accusations of sexual misconduct with a 14-year-old girl, the Huffington Post reports.
Jerry Moore said that allegations about his brother’s history with teenagers when Roy Moore was in his 30s are “not true at all.”
He added: “These women are going to… have to answer to God for these false allegations.”
Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore told Sean Hannity that a story about alleged sexual misconduct was “completely manufactured.”
Moore also claimed that his campaign has evidence of “collusion” related to the allegations, but isn’t ready to release details to the public. He suggested that, “I’m sure in the next four weeks they’re gonna come out with another article.”
Moore further explained that he “dated a lot of young ladies” but he doesn’t “remember dating any girl without the permission of her mother.”
Max Boot: “This episode is the sorry culmination of two trends that have disfigured the conservative movement beyond all recognition: contempt for the facts and desire to win at all costs. Republicans are increasingly reliant on ‘alternative facts’ manufactured by the likes of Fox News and Breitbart, which claim that global warming isn’t real and neither is the Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee. The real scandal, they tell us, is the Steele dossier paid for by the Democrats in an attempt to uncover Trump’s Russian connections. Or is it the evidence-free claim that Obama supposedly wiretapped Trump?”
“In the final analysis, no indictment of their candidate will convince the faithful. As Trump once said, ‘I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters’ Or, more to the point, Roy Moore could molest a 14-year-old girl and not lose votes. Because for Republican partisans, their opponents are ‘the forces of evil,’ and anything is preferable to that. Even Donald Trump. Even Roy Moore. So in ostensibly fighting evil, Republicans have become complicit in it.”
“This is a party that does not deserve to survive.”
“A day after explosive allegations of sexual assault surfaced against Alabama senate candidate Roy Moore, the Republican Party’s senate campaign arm has severed financial ties with the embattled former state supreme court justice,” the Daily Beast reports.
“The NRSC’s removal from the account is the most concrete step taken to date to create distance between the national Republican Party and the Moore campaign. Other lawmakers have called on Moore to leave the race. But most have said he should do so only if the accusations are proven true.”
“This is what happens when you let reckless, incompetent idiots like Steve Bannon go out and recruit candidates who have absolutely no business running for the U.S. Senate.”
— Former Mitch McConnell chief of staff Josh Holmes, quoted by the New York Times, on the allegations that Roy Moore initiated sexual relations with teenagers.
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.