Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy was already a millionaire by the time he accepted the Soros scholarship he previously said he needed in order to pay for law school, FOX News reported.
Ramaswamy has come under fire for alleged ties to George Soros, the World Economic Forum (WEF), his stance on masks, and a controversial partnership with the National Institutes of Health (NIH) over a centralized COVID-19 patient surveillance database.
Last month, Ramaswamy defended himself in a Twitter video for accepting a $90,000 award from the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans.
In 2010, Ramaswamy received the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans when he was 24, which helped him pursue a Juris Doctor in Law at Yale University. This fellowship was named after George Soros’s older brother, Paul Soros, a Hungarian-born American businessman and philanthropist, often called “the invisible Soros.”
“What is my connection with George Soros? Answer none, zero, indirect, zero connection with George Soros,” Ramaswamy said.
“In 2010, I won a scholarship when I was 24 or 25 years old and headed to law school that was partly funded not by George Soros but by Paul Soros, George’s brother. [Paul] made his money independently and who, by the way, is now dead, funded hundreds of people – hundreds of kids. I was one of them, to go to graduate school at the age of 24 or 25, back when I didn’t have a lot of money to do it.”
“If I had turned down that scholarship back then, that would have been so foolish that anybody that foolish probably should have no place anywhere near the White House doing trade deals on behalf of this country,” Ramaswamy added.
When Ramaswamy accepted the award in 2011, he was a first-year law student at Yale and had been working for several years as an investment analyst at the hedge fund QVT Financial, according to FOX News.
However, recent revelations regarding Ramaswamy’s financial records paint a different picture. In the same year he accepted the award, Ramaswamy reported $2,252,209 in total income, according to his tax returns. He also reported a total of $1,173,690 in income in the three years prior.
His campaign’s spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, defended Ramaswamy’s decision, emphasizing that the scholarship was a generic one that hundreds of students win to attend graduate school.
“Vivek would have been a fool to turn down that scholarship – Anyone who would have shouldn’t get anywhere near the White House doing trade deals,” she told Fox News Digital.
However, Ramaswamy’s Wikipedia page was updated to remove information about his association with Paul Soros, raising questions about the transparency of Ramaswamy’s candidacy according to critics.
According to Mediate, Ramaswamy seems to have paid Wikipedia editor “Jhofferman,” to remove content from his page that Ramaswamy believed would undermine his candidacy in the Republican primary. A few days later, Ramaswamy declared his intention to run in 2024.
“According to the article’s version history, the editor removed lines about Ramaswamy’s receipt of a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans in 2011,” the outlet reported.
DC Draino (also known as Rogan O’Handley) recently grilled Ramaswamy on Candace Owens’ podcast by calling out his flip-flopping on critical topics, including:
- Initially believing the 2020 election wasn’t stolen through ballot fraud
- Supporting former Vice President Mike Pence on January 6th
- Expressing interest in re-entering the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)
- Advocating for “no cap” on educated immigrants
- Encouraging everyone to get vaccinated
Also, Ramaswamy announced he would be open to evaluating pardons for the members of the Biden family, among others, if elected to the nation’s highest office, which he claimed took his words about pardoning Hunter Biden out of context as a product of “opposition research.”
“After I am leading the great revival. After we have shut down the FBI, after we have refurbished the Department of Justice, after we have systemically pardoned anyone who was a victim of politically motivated persecution—from Donald Trump and peaceful January 6 protests—then would I would be open to evaluating pardons for members of the Biden family in the interest of moving the nation forward,” he told New York Post.
Vivek Ramaswamy is one of the presidential candidates to participate in the first 2024 Republican presidential debate in Milwaukee, airing on FOX News.
According to Ramaswamy’s campaign’s spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, “In fact, there’s only one candidate that will be on stage Wednesday night whom George Soros has said he wants to win this primary – and it’s not Vivek.”
McLaughlin was likely referring to comments made by Soros at the Munich Security Conference in February.
In those remarks, Soros called DeSantis “shrewd, ruthless, and ambitious” and predicted he would be the Republican candidate.