Anti-Trump Republican Sen. Jeff Flake says he thinks the GOP should have disavowed the “birther” movement that questioned whether former president Barack Obama was born in the United States.
Flake says his party was wrong to tolerate Donald Trump’s campaign to question Obama’s birth origin.
“I wish that we, as a party, would have stood up…when the birtherism thing was going along,” Flake said on NBC News’ “Meet The Press” on Sunday. “That was particularly ugly.”
Flake also decried party loyalists for demanding that former Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton be imprisoned because she might have violated federal law by keeping classified emails on a private service.
“We shouldn’t be the party for jailing your political opponents,” Flake said.
“Anybody at those rallies ought to stand up and say, ‘That’s inappropriate. We shouldn’t be doing that.’ And I wish we as a party and elected officials would do more of that,” Flake said. “Or when particular ugly conspiracy theories go out, or simply fake news, stuff that is just demonstrably false. We ought to stand up and say, ‘Hey, that’s just not right.’”
Flake recently released a book in which he says it was a mistake for the Republican Party to support Trump’s candidacy for the presidency.
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