Who are you going to believe—Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore or the multiple women who say he pursued, molested, or assaulted them in their teens? For Donald Trump, the answer is clear and getting clearer: Roy Moore. The Daily Beast’s Lachlan Markay and Asawin Suebsaeng report that:
“This is not something he’s struggling with,” one senior White House official told The Daily Beast of Trump.
The president has even begun adopting some of Moore’s more outlandish lines of defense to push back against accusations that the candidate’s guilt is beyond question.
Two of the sources, one working in the Trump administration and the other a friend of the president, noted that in recent conversations Trump has begun to stress that the “Roy Moore, D.A.” signature in the yearbook of a woman who publicly accused the candidate of sexual assault, is a likely forgery. The president has found the signature suspicious, according to these sources. Moore has stressed this, too. Experts, for their part, disagree. [...]
… in recent days, those close to Trump tell The Daily Beast that his confidence in Moore’s version of the story has only grown stronger.
Sexual assaulters gotta stick together. And while Moore more or less admitted to the non-felonious parts of the story in his initial interview with Sean Hannity, Trump admitted that the voice on the Access Hollywood video was his, yet went on to start denying it privately, so obviously the Hannity interview isn’t a problem for Trump.
As of Tuesday, the official White House line was that the allegations were “concerning” but hey, “we don’t have a way to validate that” and he’s a Republican, so ...