J.D. Vance Has Pathetic Excuse to Escape Blame for His Racist Lies

J.D. Vance made a new claim about why he isn’t responsible for spreading false rumors about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, that have led to nearly three dozen bomb threats.

During a rally Tuesday in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, CBS’s Katrina Coffman asked Vance about whether he had a responsibility not to spread racist lies if he could help it.

“So, a woman who was behind an early Facebook post about the Haitian migrants in Springfield has now apologized for spreading false rumors,” said Kaufman. “You say that you have a responsibility to share what your constituents tell you, but don’t you also have a responsibility to fact-check them first?”

“Well I think the media has a responsibility to fact-check the residents of Springfield, not lie about them,” Vance said, as the crowd roared in response.

It’s not entirely clear what this response even means, considering the fact that the media has fact-checked the residents who claimed to have had pets abducted by immigrants, and found pretty much every claim Vance has made to be as hollow as his Never-Trump convictions.

The woman Kaufman referred to was Erika Lee, who wrote a Facebook post in the summer elevating the rumors that Haitian neighbors had stolen her other neighbor’s pets. Lee has since taken down the post after she realized she had no actual information about the incident, which, it turns out, hadn’t even happened to her neighbor, according to The New York Times .

Anna Kilgore, another woman who claimed that her pet was abducted and eaten by her neighbors in a police report obtained by the Vance campaign, told The Wall Street Journal that her cat returned to her just days later.

Vance actually did bother to fact-check—he just didn’t actually care about what he found. Vance’s team was told as early as September 9 by Springfield City Manager Ryan Heck that there was no “verifiable evidence” of Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets. But by that point Vance had already posted about it, and the Ohio senator continued to spread the racist lies anyway.

Vance’s other claim, that cases of tuberculosis and HIV are on the rise in Springfield, has also met a similar fact-checking fate. The Clark County Combined Health District Commissioner Chris Cook said Friday that Vance’s claims were completely false.

Over the weekend, Vance said he had to “create stories” so the media would focus on the real ones. Ohio Governor Mike DeWine said there had been “ at least 33 bomb threats ” in Springfield as of Tuesday.