Candidates for public office exaggerating or lying about their backstory and accomplishments is a tactic that is as old as time itself. Sometimes it works, and they are able to pull the wool over people's eyes for at least long enough to get elected and reelected.
In other instances, however, it backfires spectacularly, as we saw during the first failed presidential candidacy of then-Sen. Joe Biden (D-DE) in 1987, when he was mired in a plagiarism scandal of his own making, which was centered in part on Biden essentially stealing a UK political leader's story about family and educational history and trying to make it his own.
Though it didn't hurt Biden with Delaware voters, who kept him in the Senate for several more terms, it destroyed his presidential campaign, which only lasted three months.
SEE ALSO: Commentary: The Serial Lying Emperor Has No Clothes
As RedState documented, Biden went on to become one of the most prolific liars in American political history to the point that even reliably left-wing news outlets like the Washington Post were calling him out during his sole term in the White House for continuing to tell tall tales and whoppers about his life story decades after the plagiarism scandal that torpedoed his initial presidential run.
But though Biden is not a major player in Democrat politics anymore, there is another prominent Democrat whose backstory is being called into question amid reports that he's considering a 2028 presidential run. That man is Maryland Gov. Wes Moore:
NEW: Maryland Gov. Wes Moore often tells the story of his great-grandfather's "exile" from South Carolina to Jamaica dead of night to escape a Ku Klux Klan lynching.
— Andrew Kerr (@AndrewKerrNC) February 4, 2026
Just one problem: the story is flatly contradicted by historical records.
Here's what actually happened 👇…
While the Free Beacon's deep dive primarily focused on questions surrounding stories Moore has told about his ancestral history, it was the dubious claims Moore has put out there about his alleged accomplishments as an adult that voters should find especially troubling:
Many families tell larger-than-life stories about their forebears that wouldn't hold up to scrutiny. But your typical family-tree fabulist isn't preparing to run for president. And Moore's fantastical tale of his great-grandfather's escape from the Ku Klux Klan to exile to Jamaica adds yet another asterisk to his remarkably inflated résumé—about which the press have asked him very little.
Moore falsely claimed that he was born and grew up in Baltimore, which he did not; that he was inducted into the Maryland College Football Hall of Fame, an organization that doesn't exist; that he received a Bronze Star for his service in Afghanistan, which he had not; that in 2006 he was considered a foremost expert on radical Islam based on his graduate thesis, which he never submitted to Oxford University's library and can no longer locate; that he was a doctoral candidate at Oxford in 2006, a claim he has no documentation to support and on which Oxford refuses to comment; and that he had "a difficult childhood in the Bronx and Baltimore" despite attending New York City's elite, private Riverdale Country School—where John F. Kennedy went to school—as a child and not living in Baltimore until college, when he attended Johns Hopkins University, another elite private school.
Not surprisingly, Moore is already being compared to, you guessed it, Joe Biden:
Moore is reaching Biden levels of fabulism. https://t.co/ycXcgNBMaA pic.twitter.com/FU5xkHoQpH
— Ramesh Ponnuru (@RameshPonnuru) February 4, 2026
And Sen. Liz "Pocahontas" Warren (D-MA), too:
Wes Moore is being talked about as one of the top contenders in the 2028 Democratic primary and the guy has already told more lies about his life than Elizabeth Warren. https://t.co/5gGb2KuraP pic.twitter.com/0HErJfNSJa
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) February 4, 2026
Curious minds just have one question: Will the real Wes Moore please stand up?
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