GOP campaign strategist Steve Schmidt said he didn’t have the words to express his “shame” over the Republican Party’s failure to totally repudiate Senate nominee Roy Moore of Alabama in the wake of accusations of sexual misconduct with a 14-year-old girl.
“It’s disgraceful,” Schmidt said Friday on MSNBC’s “All In With Chris Hayes.”
“Ronald Reagan, Abraham Lincoln, Dwight Eisenhower, Teddy Roosevelt — they’re rolling over in their graves tonight,” said Schmidt, who served in George W. Bush’s White House and worked on Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s successful re-election campaign for California governor.
He called The Washington Post report Thursday of Moore’s history of pursuing teens “immaculately sourced” and credible. Moore is “accused of molesting a little girl,” Schmidt emphasized.
One of the four women identified in the Post article, Leigh Corfman, said that she was 14 in 1979 when Moore, then a 32-year-old assistant district attorney, drove her to his home, removed her shirt and pants, and groped her, then made her to touch him through his underwear. Three other women said Moore sought dates with them when they were 16 to 18 years old and he was in his 30s.
The idea that the allegations are “some sort of conspiracy that has been built, designed by Satan, in the words of Roy Moore ... is pure nonsense talk,” Schmidt said.
Schmidt sees the hesitation by some Republicans to repudiate Moore as rooted in the GOP’s extreme right wing.
“The rot, the stench, the cancer of Bannon-ism is a plague on this country,” he said, referring to Breitbart News executive Steve Bannon.