Ted Cruz called on Democrats and Republicans to “stop attacking pedophiles” as he stumbled through a Senate hearing Tuesday.
The Republican senator suffered the awkward slip up while speaking at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the Trump administration’s response to crime in cities, where he declared, “Democrat crime policies kill people.”
“Sen. [Cory] Booker also said we should have bipartisan agreement. I think that’s a great idea—we should have bipartisan agreement,” Cruz said, seizing on the Democratic senator’s earlier remarks urging Republicans to work in a “bipartisan way” to keep communities safe.
“How about we all come together and say ‘Let’s stop murders,’” Cruz continued. “How about we all come together and say ‘Let’s stop rape.’ How about we all come together and say ‘Let’s stop attacking pedophiles.’”
The Texas senator, 54, did not correct himself and moved on to rattling off statistics touting President Donald Trump’s war-on-crime spectacle in Washington, D.C.
The Daily Beast understands that Cruz meant to say “let’s stop pedophiles.”
One particular pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein, has often dominated the conversation on Capitol Hill in recent months.
Cruz in January said Trump should “absolutely” declassify files from the investigation into the late convicted child sex offender, saying, “We deserve to know who is implicated in abusing children.”
However, earlier this month, he voted against a Democratic amendment to a defense policy bill that would have compelled the Justice Department to release all of the Epstein files, joining all but two GOP senators—Josh Hawley of Missouri and Rand Paul of Kentucky—to narrowly defeat the measure.
Meanwhile, House Republicans have so far blocked an effort to hold a floor vote to force the Trump administration to disclose the still-concealed documents on Epstein—a one-time pal of the president.
During Tuesday’s Senate hearing, which was titled “Blue City Chaos and Tragedy: How the Trump Administration is Addressing the Human Cost of Soft On Crime Policies” by the GOP-led Judiciary Committee, Cruz praised Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to D.C.
Trump argued Tuesday that America was facing an “invasion from within” in a speech to hundreds of generals and admirals who had been summoned from their posts to hear the president speak alongside Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth.
Trump railed against Democratic cities such as Chicago, Portland, and Los Angeles, and told the generals he had urged Hegseth to use “dangerous” cities as training grounds for the military, declaring that “we’ll straighten them out one by one.”
