In a truly remarkable interview on Tuesday, CNN’s Jake Tapper spoke with Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore’s spokesman Ted Crockett in an interview that ended with a lengthy and uncomfortable silence about whether lawmakers have to swear an oath on the Bible.
Tapper asked Crockett about a range of issues, including accusations Moore engaged in sexual misconduct with numerous women.
“Jake, this is a smear campaign,” Crockett said after a back-and-forth with Tapper over the allegations. “That’s all this is.”
“What is?” Tapper asked.
“Doug Jones is a lawyer,” Crockett tried to explain. “This is the only thing he understands. Lawyers are like this, okay? The Washington Post, Gloria Allred, this is simply a smear campaign of accusations. That's all it is.”
“All you're trying to do is smear the man,” Crockett later added. “Everybody in Alabama knows that. We're voting today. We're going to vote for Roy Moore. We're tired of this. We're ready for merry Christmas, Jake.”
“So here's the thing,” Tapper replied. “I get that you want to make this about the Washington Post and the elite media and all that.”
“No, I'm not really knocking you, Jake,” Crockett promised. “I'm not.”
Tapper later pressed Crockett about Moore’s “controversial comments about homosexuality,” asking if he still believes homosexuality should be illegal.
“The reason people support Judge Moore in the state of Alabama is because he's a biblically based custom law of the Bible,” Crockett replied. “The mosaic English law. Homosexuality is a sin in the biblical sense. That is where Roy Moore is in the state of Alabama.”
Tapper asked what Moore thinks the punishment should be for homosexuality.
“It's just a sin, okay?” Crockett replied. “… You seem to want to take the whole, 2,000 or 3,000 years of our history and y'all want to throw it out the window as if you're going to make your own rules, your own man-made rules and do whatever you want in sin, and that's part of the problem we've got in Washington, D.C. today, Jake. We've got too many people winging up there. They're fooling with women they shouldn't be fooling with, they ought to love their wives. Roy Moore loves his wife.”
But it was when Tapper asked about Moore’s assertion that Muslim member of Congress shouldn’t be allowed to serve that the conversation truly went off the rails.
"Because you have to swear on the Bible,” Crockett said. “I had to do it. I'm an elected official three terms. I had to swear on a Bible. You have to swear on a Bible to be an elected official in the United States of America. He alleges that a Muslim cannot do that ethically swearing on the Bible.”
“You don't actually have to swear on a Christian Bible, you can swear on anything, really,” Tapper told Crockett. “I don't know if you knew that. You can swear on a Jewish Bible.”
“The law is not that you have to swear on a Christian Bible,” he continued. “That is not the law. Did you know that?”
Crockett sat in stunned silence for several seconds before replying, “I know that Donald Trump did it when he, when we made him president.”
Watch the video below, via CNN:
