He's lying': Ohio Senate candidate blames staffers and family for errors

Source: The Guardian

Mon 21 Oct 2024 06.00 EDT
Last modified on Mon 21 Oct 2024 10.27 EDT


Bernie Moreno, the Republican candidate for US Senate in Ohio, came to the US from Colombia at the age of four. He has said he learned English through Ronald Reagan’s speeches. That claim has been questioned, but if Moreno did learn the language that way, it seems one famous speech may not have fully sunk in.

At the Republican convention in 1968, Reagan said: “It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.”

Throughout a tight race – in which defeat for Sherrod Brown, the incumbent Democrat, could decide control of the Senate – Moreno has displayed a distinctly un-Reaganlike tendency to dodge responsibility for questions about his own actions, choosing repeatedly to blame others instead, a review of reporting and court documents shows.

Last month, after Moreno was shown to have falsely claimed to hold an MBA from the University of Michigan, including signing legal documents containing the claim, his campaign blamed “a staffer who made a mistake”. Moreno told a radio host: “I’m proud that I got a bachelor’s of business administration, and I thank some of the reporting pointing out that it was with high distinction. There was a clerical error made by one of my admins, seven, eight, nine years ago, that put that I had an MBA. It was a BBA.”

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/21/bernie-moreno-ohio-senate-candidate