Everywhere liberal journalists look, they see George Santos. They see him in fellow freshman Republicans Anna Paulina Luna and Andy Ogles, both of whom have recently been accused of fabricating details about the past in newspaper hit pieces.
With the breathless coverage of Santos’s brief tenure in Congress, you’d be forgiven if you thought that the new House GOP majority was filled with liars and résumé embellishers — that’s clearly the big picture that Democrats and their allies in the press are painting.
Something that curiously escapes national attention — like the multiple late-night “comedy” hours that have mocked Santos — is that shockingly, Republicans aren’t the only ones who lie about everything from their résumés to their religions.
The Spectator has cobbled together a list of Democrats whose lies have yet to receive months of breathless coverage or spawn book deals. We’re not sure why that’s the case.
Did we miss someone? Let us know!
New York state senator Julia Salazar
Fake immigrant, fake Jew
Santos’s fellow New Yorker, State Senator Julia Salazar, came to prominence in 2018, during which the first-time candidate unseated a longterm incumbent in the Democratic primary.
Salazar campaigned as a Jewish, working-class, Colombian immigrant, Columbia graduate, socialist. It turns out she is Christian, is from a middle-class family and has a $685,000 trust fund, was born in Miami, never graduated from Columbia, and was a pro-life Republican until a few years before she ran for elected office as a Democratic Socialist.
Salazar responded to a Jewish outlet’s investigations into her past by accusing it of practicing “race science.”
Even after Salazar’s lies were exposed, future congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the Democratic Socialists of America adamantly stood by their woman, who has been in the state legislature since 2019.
Connecticut senator Dick Blumenthal
Stolen valor in Vietnam and the Harvard swim team
Senator Dick Blumenthal has been memorably branded “Da-Nang Dick” to highlight when the longtime Democratic pol lied about serving in Vietnam. His claims date back to at least his first of many successful US Senate bids in 2010, when he made it clear that he served in Vietnam. “I served in Vietnam,” he said, leaving no room for equivocation.
The problem? That never happened. The New York Times reported that Blumenthal “never served in Vietnam,” and that “he obtained at least five military deferments from 1965 to 1970 and took repeated steps that enabled him to avoid going to war, according to records.”
While Blumenthal’s draft-dodging during Vietnam is mildly well known, it’s not the only biographical claim he’s lied about. In multiple profile pieces, Blumenthal claimed to be a captain of Harvard’s swim team in college. However, the New York Times also reported that “records at the college show that he was never on the team.”
Blumenthal’s college swim record has actually been the subject of some debate; left-wing outlets like Talking Points Memo have argued that because he was a member of a recreational team (although, they concede, never a captain), that his swimming service still counts.
It’s important to note that contemporary coverage of a recreational swim meet that Blumenthal did partake in reveals that most of the swimmers were naked.
Illinois representative Lauren Underwood
Fake nurse
In 2018, Democrats seized on healthcare as the issue that would win them the House majority — and they were right. Candidates such as Lauren Underwood campaigned in scrubs, assuring suburban voters that they could be trusted to protect their healthcare.
Underwood ran ads clad in a stethoscope and bearing a clipboard, in which she spoke about her experience treating patients herself. However, Underwood had never treated patients — and actually had said she had no interest in doing so. “ICU (intensive care unit) or mother-baby, like that just wasn’t my interest,” she told a podcast in 2018. “I always knew that this policy space was where I would land.” The New York Times reported that Underwood “never worked specifically with patients,” despite the ads showing her doing so.
The ad in which she treats patients itself is a core part of her invented career. Ironically, it was filmed in a dentist’s office near her parents’ house.
Maryland governor Wes Moore
Serial fabulist
National Democrats are already planning for Maryland’s Wes Moore to run for president, in part due to his incredible life story, which seems too good to be true — because it is. Moore is often portrayed, by Oprah Winfrey and other allies, as Baltimore’s native son. He himself has written about “coming home to Baltimore,” and his bestselling book, The Other Wes Moore, is required reading in public schools around the country.
In his book, Moore writes that he and another man named Wes Moore (who actually is from Baltimore) had “grown up at the same time, on the same streets, with the same name.” The problem is that, until he was attending Johns Hopkins for college, Moore had never lived in Baltimore.
CNN reports that “It wasn’t until he was a twenty-year-old undergraduate student at Johns Hopkins University that Moore first lived in Baltimore. Even then, as a student at Johns Hopkins, the world he inhabited while attending a prestigious private university was nothing like the notorious inner-city housing developments of Baltimore where the 2010 book says the other Wes Moore grew up.”
Moore has famously thin skin when it comes to others pointing out his fictionalized backstory. During last year’s Democratic primary, his campaign actually demanded a criminal investigation of one of his political opponents for circulating information that undermined his “life story.”
Moore’s porkies not only helped him win the governor’s mansion by a historic margin in November — they may one day propel him to the White House.
But he will probably never be able to shake the stigma of lying about where he’s from. During the primary, one Baltimore Democrat notably said that Moore’s childhood is “not growing up in Baltimore, that’s visiting Baltimore. That’s being here for the summer.”
California representative Sara Jacobs
Nepo-grandbaby and résumé inflater
Representative Sara Jacobs’s grandfather is a big fan of her political career. So much so that Irwin Jacobs, the billionaire founder of Qualcomm, gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Emily’s List’s super PAC in 2018, which then immediately turned around and started backing Jacobs’s failed campaign.
Since then, Jacobs herself has poured millions of her own dollars into her two successful runs for Congress.
During her first campaign, she took flak from her fellow Democrats for claiming to have been a “policymaker” in the Obama administration. The reality, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune, was far different. “Jacobs held a position slightly above entry-level,” it reported. In fact, the paper claims that it would have been illegal for Jacobs to have been a policymaker, like she claimed. Jacobs, as a junior-level federal contractor, “was prohibited by federal regulations from making policy.”
Former South Carolina congressman Joe Cunningham
Another engineering intern
On the campaign trail, Cunningham told South Carolinians that he had been an ocean engineer for a “number of years,” when in fact he was an intern in Florida, according to public records.
Cunningham may even have broken the law in his 2018 campaign, where an actual engineer in South Carolina contended that the candidate illegally referred to himself as an “engineer” despite not being registered as an engineer or a firm.
Former Florida representative Patrick Erin Murphy
Neither a practicing CPA nor a small-business owner
Representative Patrick Murphy — or should we say, Erin Murphy — has claimed throughout his career that his “background as a CPA and a small business owner is exactly what we need to put our country back on track.” But a CBS Miami report claims “he has never worked a day in his life as a Certified Public Accountant. And he was never a small business owner.”
CBS actually marveled at Murphy’s rise in 2016, saying that “Murphy’s rise is extraordinary because of how little he seems to have accomplished to get here.”
Prior to his runs for Congress, which his father donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to, Murphy went by his middle name Erin prior to his political career. He also was a Republican until shortly before he decided to run for Congress in 2012.
During his failed Senate campaign in 2016, Murphy took weekends off to vacation on his father’s ninety-seven-foot yacht, named Cocktails.
“What’s so wrong about taking the Fourth of July weekend off?” one of Murphy’s pals asked at the time.
Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren
Fake Native American
Senator Elizabeth Warren is the author of many noteworthy books and articles, including The Two-Income Trap. Warren is also, perhaps more infamously, the author of the “Pow Wow Chow” recipe
For decades, Warren claimed to be a Native American, using it to get ahead in her academic career. But like Rachel Dolezal, she was finally caught. Harvard even traded off of Warren’s false claims of Native American ancestry when it was under fire for being insufficiently diverse in the 1990s. The decades of Native American cultural appropriation have never really hamstrung her career though; they did, however, culminate in Warren taking a DNA test that revealed that she has as little as 1/1,024th Native American ancestry.
One aspect of her family history that Warren has not bragged about on the campaign trail is that her ancestor, Jonathan Crawford, actually “rounded up Cherokees for the trail of tears,” according to Breitbart.
Georgia senator Jon Ossoff
‘Résumé puffery’
While Ossoff was campaigning unsuccessfully for a House seat in 2017, he told voters that “I’ve got five years of experience as a national security staffer in the US Congress. I held top secret security clearance.” While he was clear in making two separate claims–having five years as a staffer and a top secret security clearance, the Washington Post found that he was a bit too cute by half. Ossoff had his security clearance for less than half a year, it turns out.
While Ossoff did have a surprising amount of influence as a college student working on the Hill, the Post nevertheless dinged him for “declaring himself a ‘senior national security staffer’ [which] is also [a] bit too much résumé puffery.”
New Jersey representative Andy Kim
More ‘résumé puffery’
Ossoff isn’t the only Democrat that the Washington Post has accused of “résumé puffery.” And unlike Ossoff, Andy Kim won his first election, despite lying about his national security work.
While running in one of the most competitive seats in America, Kim played up his bipartisan bona fides by claiming in an ad that he was “a national security officer for Republican and Democratic presidents.” His work for Obama is unquestioned; however, the extent of his work in the Bush administration was, per the Post, at a “USAID job [that] was an entry-level position, [he] held it for only five months in 2005, [the job was] low on the totem pole, and Bush did not at the time place much focus on Africa in his national security strategy.”
“It seems,” the Post concluded, “like a classic case of résumé puffery.”
Michigan representative Haley Stevens
The chief of staff who wasn’t
The auto industry is huge in Michigan, so it’s no surprise that when Haley Stevens was first running for Congress that she played up her role in the Treasury Department’s task force that bailed out several automakers.
“I’m Haley Stevens and I was chief of staff to President Obama’s auto rescue,” she claimed in ads during the 2018 cycle.
However, personnel records obtained by America Rising list her titles as “special assistant” and “confidential assistant,” contradicting both Stevens and her allies, who claim that she acted as chief of staff to the taskforce, despite seeming to have never actually held that role.
Secretary of state Hillary Clinton
Courage Under (Non-existent) Sniper Fire
In the same way that Pete Buttigieg hoped that being named transportation secretary would ease his path to the White House, Hillary Clinton assumed that traveling the world as secretary of state would guarantee her a promotion in 2016.
She traveled almost a million miles in that role, but one of her most infamous trips came while she was first lady.
“I remember landing under sniper fire,” Clinton bragged in 2008. “There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”
Of course, none of that happened on her 1996 trip. In fact, fact-checkers concluded that “a review of nearly 100 news accounts of her visit shows that not a single newspaper or television station reported any security threat to the first lady.” In fact, “far from running to an airport building with their heads down, Clinton and her party were greeted on the tarmac by smiling US and Bosnian officials. An eight-year-old Muslim girl, Emina Bicakcic, read a poem in English. An Associated Press photograph of the greeting ceremony, above, shows a smiling Clinton bending down to receive a kiss.”
Here’s video of Clinton walking, unscathed and without a sniper bullet in sight.
President Joe Biden
Liar-in-chief
Joe Biden’s list of lies is actually breathtaking, and probably impossible to document entirely. Biden famously was forced to drop out of the 1988 presidential race after his extensive plagiarism was exposed. That hasn’t stopped him in the years since.
Here’s our list of just a few of the lies that Biden has told over his decades in elected office.
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Biden falsely claimed that his ‘helicopter was forced down with a three-star general and three senators at 10,500 feet in the middle of those mountains’ in Afghanistan near Osama bin Laden’s lair. In reality, the helicopter encountered a snowstorm
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Biden has falsely claimed that both he was a coal miner and that his ancestors were coal miners. In 2008, he told an audience of actual coal miners, ‘I hope you won’t hold it against me, but I am a hard-coal miner, anthracite coal, Scranton, Pennsylvania.’ Embarrassingly, his campaign said that Biden was joking. During his 1988 campaign, he plagiarized Welsh politician Neil Kinnock’s speech when he claimed that his ancestors were coal miners. Unlike Biden, Kinnock’s ancestors actually were coal miners
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Biden falsely claimed that he graduated in the top half of his class at Syracuse’s law school. Eventually, he was forced to admit that he graduated seventy-sixth out of eighty-five
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Biden falsely claimed to have predicted the September 11 terrorist attacks the day before they happened. While Biden did predict that America was at risk of an airborne terrorist attack, he was strictly referring to one in the context of biological warfare
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Biden falsely claimed he was ‘shot at’ in the Green Zone while visiting Iraq. In reality, a mortar landed near his hotel
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Biden falsely claimed that he awarded his uncle a long overdue Purple Heart while he was serving as vice president. ‘When I got elected vice president, [my dad] said, “Joey, Uncle Frank fought in the Battle of the Bulge,”’ Biden claimed. ‘So we got [uncle Frank] the Purple Heart.’ Joe Biden was elected vice president in 2008. His father died in 2002, and his uncle Frank died in 1999
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Biden falsely claimed that he was the first in his family to go to college, even though he has acknowledged in the past that his relatives on his mother’s side had gone to college.
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Biden falsely claims to have been a civil rights activist, and that he ‘participated in sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and movie houses in my state.’ Ironically, his own words contradict those claims. After he dropped out of the 1988 presidential election, he admitted that his only civil-rights experience was working at an all-black swimming pool. ‘I was a suburbanite kid who got a dose of exposure to what was happening to black Americans,’ he said
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Biden falsely claimed that he was ‘raised in the black church,’ which actual members of the church he claimed to have attended have disputed
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During his 1988 campaign, Biden falsely claimed that he marched on Selma during the Civil Rights era. In 2013, he acknowledged during a visit to Selma that ‘I should have been here. It’s one of the regrets that I have and many in my generation have’
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Biden falsely claimed that he was arrested while going to visit Nelson Mandela in South Africa. In reality, ‘there is no evidence to prove that Biden was arrested in South Africa in the 1970s while trying to visit Mandela’
“I exaggerate when I’m angry,” Biden acknowledged over thirty years ago. It’s almost impressive that he’s stayed mad this long.
