Maryland governor Wes Moore (D.) declared he won't waste "a second" of his time finding his missing graduate thesis, which he now claims made him an expert on Hamas. Oxford University, meanwhile, refuses to confirm whether Moore was ever a doctoral candidate in 2006, a representation he made in the résumé he submitted that year to obtain a prestigious White House fellowship that jump-started his political career.
"I am not going to spend a second of my time trying to dig up a paper that I wrote 20 some odd years ago because a blog, because a right-wing blog post is asking me to," Moore, a prospective 2028 Democratic presidential candidate who has faced repeated scrutiny for inaccurate portrayals of his background, told the Baltimore Sun in a late December interview. "I'm too busy."
Moore was referring to a Washington Free Beacon report in December that revealed nobody can find the graduate thesis Moore completed as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, a document he once claimed had "earned him praise as one of the foremost experts" on radical Islam in the Western Hemisphere and had paved the way for his ostensible Oxford doctoral candidacy in 2006.
During the same interview, Moore claimed that his Oxford thesis, Radical Islam in Latin America in the late 20th Century and Its Middle Eastern Roots, made him an expert in Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group based in the eastern hemisphere that has no operational presence in Latin America.
"Part of the reason that I am, just a firm belief that groups like Hamas will never be a part of a long-term peace process inside of the Middle East is because I know them too well," Moore told the Sun. "Not just [as] a soldier who led soldiers overseas, but as someone who had studied these groups, and actually, and again, my master's thesis was on this work."
As for Oxford, it now says the laws of the United Kingdom prohibit it from verifying Moore's academic claims. The British university rejected a Free Beacon Freedom of Information Act request seeking confirmation that Moore was ever a doctoral candidate in 2006, saying in a January 13 letter the disclosure of information that would confirm his doctoral candidacy could reveal the "personal data of a third-party." The university's Bodleian Library told the Free Beacon in December it cannot find "any trace" of Moore's thesis because he never submitted it to the library.
There is as yet no indication that Moore will authorize Oxford to release his academic records to the public. His office did not return a request for comment.
In addition to his suspect academic claims, Moore has falsely claimed that he was born and grew up in Baltimore, was inducted into the nonexistent Maryland College Football Hall of Fame, received a Bronze Star for his service in Afghanistan, and had a "difficult childhood," even though he attended Riverdale Country School in New York City, one of the most elite private schools in the country.
Moore's steadfast refusal to locate his missing graduate thesis indicates he will never be able to receive his formal degree certificate at an Oxford graduation ceremony. A "degree confirmation" form shows that Moore completed his Master of Letters degree in International Relations in November 2005, a full four years after he began his Oxford studies, but does not yet have his formal certificate because he never walked at a graduation ceremony.
Moore cannot walk at an Oxford graduation ceremony until he submits a copy of his graduate thesis to the Bodleian Library, Oxford deputy communications chief Julia Paolitto told the Free Beacon.
Moore did not leave a memorable impression with at least one Oxford professor who taught at the school's Department of International Relations from 1987 to 2011. Avi Shlaim, an Oxford emeritus professor at the department that awarded Moore's master's degree, said he has "never heard of this chap" when asked if he knew anything about Moore's thesis.
Speculating as to how Moore can claim to have been a doctoral candidate after spending four years completing a Master of Letters degree—a degree that typically takes two years to earn—Shlaim said Moore's degree may have been a consolation prize for a failed doctoral thesis.
"Usually when a doctoral thesis is not good enough to pass, the examiners offer a chance to revise and resubmit," Shlaim told the Free Beacon. "But sometimes they offer an M.Litt for the thesis without any revision."
