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.
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