WASHINGTON -- Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Sunday that he was "going to let the people of Alabama make the call," after arguing for weeks that Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore should leave the race.
Asked during an appearance on ABC News' This Week whether he thought Moore, who has been accused of preying on teenage girls, should be in the Senate, McConnell said the decision should be left to the Dec. 12 special election.
"This election has been going on a long time," McConnell, R-Ky., said. "There has been a lot of discussion about it. They are going to make the decision a week from Tuesday."
In the past, McConnell had said that he was looking at drafting a write-in candidate for the election, and that if Moore, a Republican, won the race, he would support a Senate Ethics Committee investigation into the allegations against him.
But on Sunday, McConnell seemed to accept that Moore, who has denied the allegations, would not be stepping down with only days remaining before the vote.
Antonia Ferrier, a spokesman for McConnell, said the senator was not backing down from any earlier comments about Moore. "The leader did not change or retract any of his previous statements," she said in an email on Sunday.
McConnell told ABC News that he still believed that the Ethics Committee should investigate the allegations against Moore.
Several women have accused Moore of sexually inappropriate behavior. They said they had been subjected to groping, forcible kissing or other unwanted advances when they were teenagers and he was a prosecutor in his 30s.
McConnell noted on Sunday that two decades ago, when he was the chairman of the Ethics Committee, he had recommended the expulsion of Sen. Bob Packwood, the powerful Oregon Republican, who resigned in 1995 after he was accused of sexual harassment.
"The Senate has been very sensitive to these matters for a long time, and the Senate Ethics Committee will handle this in the regular order way that we do this in the Senate," he said. "And I'm confident they will come up with the right conclusion."
Moore has made limited public appearances, leading to Democrat Doug Jones, who held a flurry of events over the weekend, to mock Moore for hiding.
"We're on the campaign trail meeting all of you and meeting folks here as no one knows where Roy Moore is," Jones said Friday to a crowd of reporters interviewing him.
Moore made three campaign stops last week. Audiences in country churches still welcome the Bible-toting Moore. But Moore's campaign has been on the defensive since The Washington Post reported claims of sexual misconduct.
Moore was seen as likely to win easily before the story, but the fallout has given Jones a shot in Republican-controlled Alabama.
Information for this article was contributed by Yamiche Alcindor of The New York Times; and by Kim Chandler and Jay Reeves of The Associated Press.
A Section on 12/04/2017