Months before launching her Iowa Senate bid, former Democratic Lt. Gov. Patty Judge toured a local ethanol plant with Donald Trump and encouraged members of America’s Renewable Future to consider supporting candidates like him, according to audio obtained by the Washington Examiner.
Judge has routinely criticized her opponent, incumbent Republican Sen. Chuck Grassley, for supporting his party’s presidential nominee since she entered the Senate race in early March. Most recently, she told reporters it was “unconscionable” that Grassley declined to withdraw his support for Trump in the wake of his lewd audio tape scandal.
“I have three sons, and if that was just locker room banter, I hope to God I’ve taught them better than that, because that is not acceptable behavior, it is demeaning to women and it is not acceptable,” Judge said on Monday, according to the Muscatine Journal.
“I don’t think you can have it both ways, you either think it’s OK, and you support that kind of behavior, or you don’t,” she added.
But in November 2015, three months before the Iowa caucuses, Judge welcomed Trump to a local biorefining ethanol plant in Gowrie and praised his support for the renewable fuel standard. At the time, Judge was co-chair of the America’s Renewable Future (ARF), a bipartisan coalition of various organizations and individuals who lobbied the 2016 presidential candidates to support the RFS.
“We have been talking to candidates every day and we are very happy when one of them decides they can take time from their schedules to come and actually see an ethanol plant and know what they’re talking about, and we have a chance today to talk to Mr. Trump,” Judge had said during the visit. “I’m very glad that he is with us and that he has pledged his support to our industry.”
“We know that may not be the determining factor on who you decide to go to caucus for in February, but we hope it is something that you will look long and hard at, because it really is important to the future of the industry,” Judge added, noting that ARF would not shy away from educating voters on which candidates support the federal ethanol directive.
“There’s a lot of competing interests for our time and for our share of the market, and we don’t need that. So we’ve got to stick together and we’ll try to keep that message going from now through February,” she said.
Trump was five months into his presidential campaign when Judge embraced him at the event in Iowa, and he had already stirred several of the controversies her campaign has cited in its criticism of Grassley’s support for the GOP nominee.
“Chuck Grassley has lined himself up with Donald Trump,” said Judge on the night of her primary victory in June. “He said he would campaign with him. He would support him. People in the Republican Party are starting to try to move away. Chuck Grassley is not doing that. That is at his peril.
“Whether it’s the wall, his attacks on the gold star family, his attacks on women and people with disabilities, Chuck Grassley has stood there,” Judge’s campaign manager, Sam Roecker, told reporters last month.
Grassley leads Judge by more than 15 percentage points in the latest RealClearPolitics‘ state-level polling average of likely voters in the Hawkeye State.
In an email to the Examiner, the Iowa senator’s campaign manager, Bob Haus, said Judge’s comments about Trump’s fall are “just another example of [her] politically motivated hypocrisy.”
Roecker, meanwhile, praised Judge for her “tireless advocacy” on getting nearly every 2016 presidential hopeful, including Trump, to pledge to support the ethanol mandate. “However, supporting the Renewable Fuel Standard is not enough to be president,” he said.
“Unlike Chuck Grassley, Patty Judge does not tolerate Donald Trump’s bigoted rhetoric, she is disgusting by his comments bragging about sexual assault, and she would never trust Donald Trump to select a Supreme Court justice or have access to the nuclear codes,” he added.
