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A top Roy Moore campaign official is giving staff and volunteers talking points on how to fight back against reports that their candidate had inappropriate relationships and interactions with teenage girls when he was in thirties, according to a document the campaign provided to Vox.
Moore’s deputy campaign manager Hannah Ford sent an email to staff and volunteers urging them to repeat a theme: the liberal media is spreading fake news; the women are lying. (The document is posted in full below.)
“We have prepared a primer that lists the ‘fake news’ put out by four women followed by some of the evidence and responses that has been uncovered and that show the claims to be entirely false,” the document begins.
The evidence that the accusations are untrue chiefly rely Breitbart News, and, at times, the Moore campaign itself. Some of the efforts to discredit the claims attack the character of the accusers.
The document is available in full here:
In one instance, the campaign suggests staffers point out that Moore couldn’t have called a teenage girl in her bedroom decades ago because “there was no telephone in her bedroom.”
In another, the campaign says not to believe a woman who accused Moore of assaulting her in a parking lot near dumpsters behind a restaurant where she worked when she was 15 because “said restaurant didn’t hire 15-year-olds” and “the dumpsters were on side (not back).”
The campaign has been working for weeks to discredit or diminish the allegations brought forth from reporting by the Washington Post, AL.com, and other national news outlets. Speaking to CNN, Janet Porter, a Moore spokesperson, said Thursday that the media has been acting as a “lynch mob” to discredit Moore.
Moore is in one of the toughest races Republicans have faced in Alabama in recent years. Voters head to the polls on Tuesday.
He won the primary against Sen. Luther Strange, who was appointed to fill the vacancy left by Jeff Sessions, before the bombshell allegations were reported by the Washington Post in early November. Polls show the race nearly deadlocked against Democrat Doug Jones, a former prosecutor whose claim to fame is obtaining a conviction for members of the Ku Klux Klan who bombed a black church in 1963.
The Moore campaign document was sent out before the news Friday that Beverly Nelson, who says Moore made unwanted sexual advances and groping when she was 16, had added “notes” underneath Moore’s signature in her high school yearbook. Conservative news outlets have taken this to mean the signature itself is a forgery.
Other sources include the One America News Network (a conservative television network and website affiliated with the conservative Washington Times), the Daily Wire (another conservative site), a local news story on AL.com that quotes a former Moore chief of staff at length (as well as a link to an AL.com story detailing an accuser’s account), and Moore’s campaign website itself. In one instance, the document cites Moore denying allegations on a “national radio show” as a refutation of the Washington Post’s reporting.
In many instances, the talking points attack the women’s characters. The document notes that Leigh Corfman, who has said Moore pursued her when she was 14 and he was in his 30s, had “disciplinary and behavioral” problems at the time. It says that Nelson “didn’t even tell her then-boyfriend who picked her up shortly after the supposed assault,” and that her lawyer Gloria Allred is a “radical feminist.” It charges that Tina Johnson, who says Moore groped her in a law office, “has pled guilty to writing bad checks and third-degree theft of property.”
The document says it’s “doing the job most of the press has not bothered to do.”
