Donald Trump urged his hand-picked Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker to slander his opponent, Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA), but he balked at the advice.
The former president pestered Walker, the former college football and NFL star, to falsely smear Warnock as a "child molester," according to excerpts from ABC News reporter Jonathan Karl's new book, "Tired of Winning," that were published by The Guardian.
“But I got no evidence of that,” Walker said.
Trump, however, was not deterred and repeatedly urged the Republican candidate to make the ugly allegation.
“Just do it,” Trump said. “Just call him a child molester.”
Walker ignored Trump's advice before Election Day, but after the election became a runoff set for Dec. 6, 2022, the GOP candidate with a documented history of domestic violence started slurring Warnock over allegations of abuse at a camp run by his church.
“This young man said there was sexual abuse and there was physical abuse,” Walker told a crowd. “Who did that? It has to be Senator Raphael Warnock, because he was responsible for it.”
Walker's campaign ran social media ads falsely stating that Warnock had been arrested for interfering in a police investigation of a summer camp that he was running, but the senator – who is pastor of the church that ran the camp – played no active role in the camp and was not the target of investigators.
However, Warnock and the church's youth minister were arrested at the camp in July 2022 after blocking officers from interviewing teenage counselors, saying lawyers should have been present, and a prosecutor dropped charges against them and said both were "very helpful" to the investigation.
The camp was shut down for summer 2003 in part due to unreported allegations of abuse, but allowed to reopen the following summer, and a 12-year-old camper's family reached a settlement in 2005 in a lawsuit alleging two employees had tossed urine on him and locked him in a cabin overnight.
