Sen. Mike Lee didn't hesitate to offer a full-throated response to why he has not yet endorsed Donald Trump's presidential bid. | Getty Sen. Mike Lee goes on epic rant about Donald Trump

Pressed during a telephone interview Wednesday night to explain why he has not yet endorsed Donald Trump’s presidential bid, Sen. Mike Lee unloaded.

“Hey look, Steve, I get it. You want me to endorse Trump,” Lee (R-Utah) told NewsMaxTV host Steve Malzberg. “We can get into that if you want. We can get into the fact that he accused my best friend’s father of conspiring to kill JFK. We can go through the fact that he’s made statements that some have identified correctly as religiously intolerant. We can get into the fact that he’s wildly unpopular in my state, in part because my state consists of people who are members of a religious minority church. A people who were ordered exterminated by the governor of Missouri in 1838. And, statements like that make them nervous.”


Despite all that, the senator went on to say that his concerns with Trump were not irreversible and that the presumptive GOP nominee could win his support “if I heard the right things out of him.”

Malzberg pushed back, suggesting that the FBI’s investigation of Hillary Clinton and her charity’s connections to foreign governments should far outweigh any issues with Trump.

The host pointed specifically to Trump’s insinuation that Sen. Ted Cruz’s father was somehow involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy as relatively trivial in comparison to Clinton’s scandals, but Lee didn’t see it that way.

“Right, right. He said that. He actually said that. He said that without any scintilla, without a scintilla of evidence. Now that concerns me,” Lee said. “Again I hope I can get over this, because I can’t vote for Hillary. I know there’s no possibility of that. What I am saying is that Donald Trump can still get a lot of votes from a lot of conservatives like me, but I would like some assurances on where he’s going to stand his ground. I’d like some assurances that he’s going to be a vigorous defender for the U.S. Constitution.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Lee continued. “But that is not an unreasonable demand.”