Pressed for evidence to support his oft-repeated claim that his great-grandfather and grandfather were run out of South Carolina in the 1920s by the Ku Klux Klan, Maryland governor Wes Moore (D.) produced no evidence. Instead, his aides pointed to the "broader reality" of race relations in the Jim Crow South.
"We’re not going to litigate a family’s century-old oral history with a partisan outlet," Moore spokesman Ammar Moussa told Fox News on Tuesday. The outlet had asked him about a Washington Free Beacon report revealing that Moore’s story is flatly contradicted by historical records and is almost certainly false. "The broader reality is not in dispute: Intimidation and racial terror were pervasive in the Jim Crow South, and it rarely came with neat documentation."
Moussa’s statement is reminiscent of a defense offered on behalf of former CBS News anchor Dan Rather, who based a 2004 60 Minutes segment on fraudulent memos criticizing then-president George W. Bush’s service in the National Guard. The scandal ended Rather’s career at CBS, but the New York Times reported in a story that carried the headline "Memos on Bush are Fake But Accurate, Typist Says" that the memos, though fake, contained accurate information.
"The information in them is correct," the Times quoted an 86-year-old former secretary saying of the forged memos. Rather did not respond to a request for comment.
Moore’s great-grandfather, the Rev. Josiah Johnson Thomas, preached at a church in Pineville, S.C., in the early 1920s. Church records and contemporary news reports reviewed by the Free Beacon indicate that, contrary to Moore’s claim that Thomas fled secretly to Jamaica in the middle of the night, he made an orderly and public transfer to the island of his birth after a prominent pastor died unexpectedly a week earlier. Amid the copious documentation of Thomas’s life and career, there is no mention of trouble with the Ku Klux Klan, which operated openly across the country in the 1920s but never had a chapter operating in Pineville.
Moore made the story of his great-grandfather’s harrowing escape from the Klan the center of his stump speech during his 2022 gubernatorial campaign, and his version of the story has been repeated by prominent outlets including the Washington Post and Time, the latter of which stated that the story made Moore "well acquainted with the case against America."
Moore’s communications director, David Turner, said the Free Beacon’s "obsession" with reporting on Moore was "weird."
"Your obsession with having the only Black Governor and his family tell you their family history is…..weird?" Turner posted on X on Tuesday. "It’s weird."
Moore, an aspiring 2028 presidential candidate, has been tripped up by several inflated biographical claims. He falsely claimed he was born and grew up in Baltimore, which he did not; that he was inducted into the Maryland College Football Hall of Fame, an organization that doesn't exist; that he received a Bronze Star for his service in Afghanistan, which he had not; that he was a foremost expert on radical Islam based on his graduate thesis, which he never submitted to the University of Oxford's library and can no longer locate; and that he was a doctoral candidate at Oxford, a claim he has no documentation to support and on which Oxford refuses to comment.
Allegations of misrepresenting personal biographies for political gain have spelled doom for prominent Democratic politicians seeking their party’s presidential nomination.
Like Moore, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.) cited her family’s oral history when she claimed to be a descendant of the Cherokee Nation, though Warren never made the claim on the presidential campaign trail. She revealed in 2018 she was between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American. "When I was growing up in Oklahoma, I learned about my family the way most people do. My brothers and I learned from our mom and our dad and our brothers and our sisters. They were family stories."
