Earlier in the week, President Donald Trump met with members of the House Freedom Caucus to discuss a wide variety of issues, including domestic and foreign policy.
In attendance for the meeting was Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL), who, in an interview with Huntsville, AL radio’s WVNN, offered up some of the details of the meeting.
According to Brooks, in addition to impeachment and the Middle East, Trump also expressed his interest in Alabama’s U.S. Senate election, which features a hotly contested race for the Republican nomination.
“The meeting was limited to House Freedom Caucus members,” Brooks said. “We discussed impeachment. We discussed Syria, Turkey and the Kurds. We discussed the Alabama Senate race. The president asked me how the Republican primary was unfolding and how our candidate was apt to do against Doug Jones. And we discussed several other topics. It was a very cordial, social kind of gathering in which we also mixed in public policy and politics.”
Vying for the opportunity to face the incumbent Sen. Doug Jones (D-AL), who is the likely Democratic nominee, are U.S. Rep. Bradley Byrne (R-AL), former Auburn University head football coach Tommy Tuberville, Alabama Secretary of State John Merrill, State Rep. Arnold Mooney (R) and former Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore.
When asked, Brooks explained Trump’s interest in that election.
“He’s keenly interested,” Brooks replied. “The president had about a 30-minute monologue, which was very informative, very entertaining, very funny at times, very engaging. You can see why he was such a success with his apprenticeship program on TV and why he was able to come virtually out of nowhere and surprise so many people and get elected president of the United States. And after he finished that monologue, he turned to me and asked about the Alabama Senate race. Apparently, it is high on the radar screen. We have got to win this thing because we’ve got some Republican senators who may lose in some of these other states. So it is important if we’re going to have good conservative Supreme Court justices that we carry this Alabama seat so we’ll have enough to confirm justices that Donald Trump would want to submit in a second term. And we spent about five or six minutes on the Alabama Senate race just as an aside.”
The Alabama congressman went on to say he had “no way of knowing” whether or not Trump would get involved in the race for the Republican nod as he did in the lead up to the 2017 GOP U.S. Senatorial primary when he endorsed then-Sen. Luther Strange (R-AL) over Brooks and Moore. Moore went on to win the nod but was defeated by Jones.
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor
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