Alabama Sen. Richard Shelby said he had to vote for a Republican in his state’s Senate race to replace Attorney General Jeff Sessions, but he picked a write-in candidate because he “couldn’t vote for Roy Moore.”
Multiple women accused Moore, the Republican candidate in the race, of either pursuing them or groping them when they were in their teens and he was in his 30s. Shelby said those accusations were one of the main reasons why he didn’t vote for his party’s nominee.
“I would rather see the Republican win, but I would hope that Republican would be a write-in. I couldn’t vote for Roy Moore. I didn’t vote for Roy Moore. But I wrote in a distinguished Republican name,” he said on CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday.
Moore said he didn’t fault President Trump for jumping into the race behind Moore, as the president has done in the last two weeks after about a month of doubt over whether he’d do so.
He said Trump had to make his own decision, but the Republican Party can do better than Moore.
“As a Republican, I had to vote Republican and wanted to vote Republican. I understand where the president’s coming from,” he said. “I understand we would like to retain that seat in the U.S. Senate. But I tell you what, there’s a time, we call it a tipping point, and I think so many accusations, so many cuts, so many drip, drip, drip, when it got to the 14-year-old story … that was enough for me. I said, ‘I can’t vote for Roy Moore.’“
Shelby added he believes the women who have accused Moore and the amount of accusations worries him.
“The women are believable. I have no reason not to believe them just like the attorney general sessions said,” he said. “He had no reason not to believe the women. They were credible. But I wasn’t there. I don’t know what happened. But there are a lot of stories there, a lot of smoke. Has to be fire somewhere.”
