Washington CNN —
For at least the third time in the last two weeks, Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has falsely described something he wrote before he launched his campaign.
The three false claims have something in common. Ramaswamy made all three as he tried to distance himself from his past criticism of former President Donald Trump, the dominant frontrunner in the race for the 2024 Republican nomination.
Ramaswamy made the latest claim during a combative Wednesday interview with MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan. Hasan brought up a tweet from January 12, 2021, six days after a pro-Trump mob attacked the US Capitol, in which Ramaswamy wrote, “What Trump did last week was wrong. Downright abhorrent. Plain and simple.” Hasan asked him to specify what Trump did that was “downright abhorrent.”
Ramaswamy, refusing to answer directly, said, “Let’s actually be really fair to your audience. So on January 10, 2021 – thereabouts, days after that incident – I wrote an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal arguing that censorship was the real cause of what happened on January 6.” After Hasan responded, “Which isn’t true, but yeah,” Ramaswamy continued: “Well, that’s what I wrote, I’m giving you the facts of what I said; that’s a hard fact, that was published in The Wall Street Journal.”
But it wasn’t.
Facts First: Ramaswamy’s claim is false. He never argued in The Wall Street Journal op-ed that censorship was the real cause of the January 6 riot. Rather, Ramaswamy and his...
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