With new polls showing that accused sexual predator Judge Roy Moore has regained the lead in the Alabama senatorial race, some Republicans are scrambling to avoid having their party remembered as the one who put an alleged pedophile in office. One of them is Arizona Senator Jeff Flake, who tweeted a photo of a $100 check made out to the campaign of Moore’s opponent, Democrat Doug Jones.
“Country over party,” he wrote in the tweet accompanying the picture; the same phrase could be seen in the memo section of his donation check.
Country over Party pic.twitter.com/JZMTaEYdxQ
— Jeff Flake (@JeffFlake) December 5, 2017
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On Monday, Flake agreed with a tweet by former Republican Governor Mitt Romney saying an election win for Moore would be a huge blow to the GOP’s reputation. “Roy Moore in the US Senate would be a stain on the GOP and on the nation. Leigh Corfman and other victims are courageous heroes,” Romney wrote. “No vote, no majority is worth losing our honor, our integrity.”
“.@MittRomney is right,” Flake tweeted in response. “A Roy Moore victory is no victory for the GOP and the nation.”
While many Republicans condemned Moore after the Washington Post published a report of the numerous allegations of sexual assault against him in early November, Flake has refused to support Moore from the beginning.
“A guy who says that a Muslim member of Congress shouldn’t be able to serve? That’s not right,†Flake said in October, referencing an op-ed — titled “Muslim Ellison Should Not Sit In Congress” — Moore wrote in 2006 about Democrat Rep. Keith Ellison.
Trump, on the other hand, decided to explicitly endorse Moore on Monday in a set of morning tweets.
