About the scholarship itself, received twelve years ago? Probably not. But the ways in which Vivek Ramaswamy has tried to disentangle himself from the indirect connection to George Soros may offer some reasons to consider just what kind of politician Ramaswamy is, and will be.

The story has floated to the top of the chum in the waters of the 2024 GOP presidential primary, especially among Ramaswamy’s opponents. In 2011, Ramaswamy took $90,000 to pay tuition for Yale Law School from the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans. Paul Soros was the late older brother of George Soros, the ultra-billionaire spending hundreds of millions in the US to push a hard-progressive agenda.

Needless to say, a Soros connection of any kind is almost certainly box-office poison in a GOP primary fight. Ramaswamy acknowledges taking the scholarship funds, but claims that he couldn’t pay for law school without it:

There was a separate scholarship that I won at the age of 24-25, when I was going to law school in my mid-20s, in my early 20s, when I didn’t have the money and it was a merit scholarship that hundreds of kids win, that was partially funded, not by George Soros, but by Paul Soros a relative, his brother. …

And to be perfectly honest with you, I would have had to be a fool to turn down that scholarship at the age of 24.

That would normally be a good and acceptable answer. Ramaswamy’s correct that this scholarship had no real direct connection to George Soros. The “fellowship” program is a generic scholarship set up for immigrants and children of immigrants, offering support in any degree field. One key prerequisite is that applicants demonstrate “a commitment to the United States’ fundamental principles and ideals,” which seems a rather noble calling if it is carried out at face value. And the money came from Paul, not George (or John or Ringo either, for that matter).

That explanation should suffice — if Ramaswamy had just told the truth and stuck with it. Unfortunately, that isn’t what Ramaswamy has done.

In the first place, Ramaswamy himself has tried to cover up the record of the scholarship, which certainly makes it look suspicious. In May, as Ramaswamy was entering the GOP presidential primary, Mediaite reported that Ramaswamy paid off a Wikipedia editor to remove the reference to the Soros scholarship, and that’s not all he wanted removed:

Ramaswamy’s Wikipedia page includes the warning, “this article has multiple issues,” with a note that it “contains paid contributions” and “may require cleanup to comply with Wikipedia’s content policies, particularly neutral point of view.”

The source of these concerns are changes made by an editor with the screen name “Jhofferman,” who has disclosed that he was paid by Ramaswamy to make alterations to the page.

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. Paul Soros was the older brother of billionaire funder of leftist causes George Soros, who was the biggest individual political donor in the United States during the 2022 election cycle. Also removed from the page on February 9, 2023 was Ramaswamy’s role on the state of Ohio’s Covid-19 Response Team. The editor recorded that Ramaswamy’s Covid-era work was removed from the article by the candidate’s own explicit request, while his Soros fellowship was deemed “extraneous material” by the editor.

Let’s pause on the scholarship and wonder why the COVID-19 Response Team information was targeted. Why would Ramaswamy want his relevant government experience erased from the record? As Mediate notes, Ohio was a rare red state that kept restrictive measures in place, an issue that came up in Mike DeWine’s gubernatorial re-election. Ohio voters didn’t hold it against DeWine, but with Ron DeSantis leading the Not Trump lane already, Ramaswamy apparently didn’t want DeSantis beating him over the head with Florida’s success in re-opening immediately.

Second, it turns out that Ramaswamy didn’t actually need the fellowship to pay for law school, not even at Yale. Fox News dug into Ramaswamy’s tax returns and discovered that the then-investment broker had a gross income in 2011 of $2.2 million, and had earned over a million dollars in the previous three years:

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.

In 2011, the same year he accepted the award, Ramaswamy reported $2,252,209 in total income, according to his tax returns, which he released in June. He reported a total of $1,173,690 in income in the three years prior.

Ramaswamy certainly has a lot more money now, but $2.2 million in a single year doesn’t add up to “I didn’t have the money.” I can’t find records for Yale Law’s tuition in 2011-12, but it was $60K in 2017-18 and is $71K at present. Assuming it was around $50K a year in 2011-12, tuition would have amounted to 2.3% of Ramaswamy’s gross income that year, and probably somewhere around 5% of his net.

Far from being a financial hardship case, Ramaswamy could have afforded to write his own ticket at Yale Law School, and maybe to have helped a few of his less-fortunate classmates along the way too. It would still have been arguably foolish to turn down free money from this Soros fellowship, but Ramaswamy was not the poor, struggling student he claimed to be.

In other words, he lied, and he also tried to cover it up so no one could ask him about it. If Ramaswamy thought this was as benign as he claims, why not just offer up an honest explanation and be done with it? That would have been the strategically intelligent move to make, especially for building long-term credibility.

On top of that, we have another example of Ramaswamy’s deceit and strategic incompetence this very week. Ramaswamy played footise with 9/11 Truthers last week while being interviewed and recorded by The Atlantic’s John Hendrickson. When he got called out on CNN Monday night for his ridiculous suggestion that federal agents might have infiltrated the planes that flew into the Twin Towers, he flat-out denied saying it and claimed Hendrickson had misquoted him. As anyone who paid any attention at all to modern reporting could predict, Hendrickson produced the recording that Ramaswamy approved at the time and proved his reporting accurate — and that Ramaswamy lied.

Ramaswamy is hiding more than he’s revealing on the campaign trail, and he’s not even hiding it well. He hasn’t even been elected to a single office once, and already he’s trying not one but two cover-ups on his record. So much for not being a politician.

The Paul & Daisy Soros Foundation scholarship isn’t the problem. Ramaswamy’s dishonesty and incompetent bungling is the problem. And that’s what should be disqualifying.

The latest episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast is now up! Today’s show features:

• Who scored and who didn’t at the first GOP presidential debate?
• A.J. Kaufman and I take a look at some fresh polling data and try to game out what comes next.
• Did Trump make a mistake in skipping the debate, or did he hit a home run in his Tucker Carlson interview?

The Ed Morrissey Show is now a fully downloadable and streamable show at  Spotify, Apple Podcasts, the TEMS Podcast YouTube channel, and on Rumble and our own in-house portal at the #TEMS page!