WASHINGTON (AP) – Three wavering Republican senators lambasted President Donald Trump on Wednesday for mocking a woman who has claimed Brett Kavanaugh sexually assaulted her in the 1980s, underscoring the risks of assailing Kavanaugh’s accusers as Senate support teeters for the Supreme Court nominee.
The blowback to Trump’s scoffing at Christine Blasey Ford came as lawmakers awaited results of a revived FBI background check, expected imminently, on accusations of sexual misconduct by Kavanaugh in high school and college. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., has said the chamber will vote on Kavanaugh later this week, and the conservative jurist’s fate is in the hands of a handful of undecided GOP and Democratic senators.
At a political rally in Mississippi Tuesday night, Trump mimicked Ford’s responses at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week at which she recounted Kavanaugh’s alleged attack on her when both were in high school. The audience laughed as Trump, at times inaccurately, recounted what he described as holes in her testimony.
“I had one beer – that’s the only thing I remember,” Trump said.
On NBC’s “Today” show Wednesday, Sen. Jeff Flake, R-Ariz., said that ridiculing “something this sensitive at a political rally is just not right.” Flake added, “I wish he hadn’t done it. It’s kind of appalling.”