Some of the women who accused President Donald Trump of sexual misconduct in the run-up to last year’s White House race have joined hands to demand a Congressional investigation. The women were set to hold a news conference in New York on Monday.
Hosting the news conference is Brave New Films, which last month released a video, titled “16 women and Donald Trump”. “These brave women have spoken out individually,” it said, adding the video compiling their stories in one place for the first time has been viewed more than six million times.
Trump had sought to repeatedly trash all the allegations, calling them “made-up stuff” and “totally fake news”. The White House’s position is that the women are lying and that the American people settled the issue by electing Trump despite the accusations, according to spokesperson Sarah Sanders.
When asked at one of her briefings in recent weeks, Sanders said: “look, I think that this was covered pretty extensively during the campaign. We addressed that then. The American people, I think, spoke very loud and clear when they elected this President.”
But Nikki Haley, the US envoy to the United Nations, in what was seen as a surprising departure from the White House line, took the position on Sunday that the women accusers “should be heard”.
“They should be heard, and they should be dealt with,” Haley said on CBS’s “Face the Nation”, adding: “I think any woman who has felt violated or felt mistreated in any way, they have every right to speak up.”
Asked if she considered the allegations against Trump a “settled issue” in the light of the election results, Haley commented: “You know, that’s for the people to decide. I know that he was elected. But, you know, women should always feel comfortable coming forward. And we should all be willing to listen to them.”
In contrast to the remarks of Haley, the former Indian-American Governor of South Carolina who was handpicked for the key diplomatic post at the UN, Senator Tim Scott, also a Republican from South Carolina, remarked that it is impossible to “re-litigate the election”.
“The allegations or the accusations against the president were a part of the campaign,” Scott said. “Should people who were victimised have their day in court, their opportunity to present their informationIJ I have no problem with that issue,” Scott told NBC.
Some Democratic Senators, including Bernie Sanders who lost his bid to be the party nominee for the 2016 race to Hillary Clinton, have begun demanding Trump’s resignation over the allegations.
Saying Democratic Senator Al Franken felt it proper for him to resign, Sanders told NBC’s “Meet the Press: “Here you have a president who has been accused by many women of assault, who says on a tape that he assaulted women. He might want to think about doing the same.”