Wes Moore confronted on reported misrepresentations about missing Oxford thesis, story about great-grandfather

Gov. Wes Moore, D-MD, faced questioning on reporting about misrepresentations of his past during a CBS News town hall on Sunday in regard to his Oxford thesis and his claim that his grandfather was chased out of the country by the KKK.

The Washington Free Beacon reported on Moore's past in December and found that he touted himself as a "foremost expert" on radical Islam in the Western Hemisphere on his application to be a White House fellow in 2006, an internship he got after serving in Afghanistan for a year.

The Maryland governor also wrote on the application that he graduated from Oxford in 2003 with a Master of Letters, or MLitt, in international relations.

However, the outlet reported that Oxford had no record of his thesis and that the title of his work is different from his Oxford degree confirmation and his White House fellowship application. 

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The Free Beacon additionally reported on discrepancies in his graduation date, which on his resume attached to the fellowship application, said was 2004. The degree confirmation provided to the outlet by the governor's spokesperson listed him finishing his graduate studies in November 2005.

CBS' Norah O'Donnell pressed Moore on the Free Beacon's reporting during a town hall, and asked, "Oxford says it does not have a copy of your thesis. Did you submit it? Any idea why it’s missing?"

"I think Oxford has said that I have completed my degree. There is no denying that. And that I received a Master’s degree at Oxford University in international relations after being the first African American Rhodes Scholar in the history of Johns Hopkins University. And so, there is no denying that," he said.

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He did not address the missing thesis, which Oxford deputy communications chief Julia Paolitto told the Free Beacon in December that Moore did not submit to Oxford's Bodleian Library, a requirement for graduates should they want to receive their degree at a ceremony. However, Moore did not have a ceremony.

Moore said he was a person of integrity during the CBS town hall, and insisted he was raised right by his family and trained right by the army.

The governor said Americans hate the "politics of personal destruction," which he described as, "where as a person who has nothing, neither to be ashamed of or nothing to exaggerate about my life, that this is the thing that conservative right-wing blogs want to attack, particularly when it’s something that Oxford University has verified already."

In early February, the Free Beacon reported that church records show a different account of a story Moore tells about his great-grandfather, whom he says was chased out of the country by the KKK.

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"Moore's great-grandfather on his mother's side, the Rev. Josiah Johnson Thomas, did preach in the 1920s at a church in Pineville, S.C., about 65 miles north of Charleston. But historical records housed at the archives of the Protestant Episcopal Church in the Diocese of South Carolina undercut the three main elements of Moore's story—that Thomas suddenly fled the country in secret, that he was targeted by the Ku Klux Klan, and that he was a prominent preacher who spoke from the pulpit against racism," the outlet reported.

O'Donnell asked him to respond to the reporting during the town hall.

"I mean, the same right-wing blog?" Moore said. "I can address the fact that I’m the grandson of someone who was born in South Carolina, and when he was just a child, the Ku Klux Klan ran their family, ran my family out. And not out of South Carolina, they ran them out of the United States of America, and they went to Jamaica. And much of my family has always said they would never come back to this country. It’s the reason why my mom right now, as we speak, is in Jamaica, she’s visiting with family members."

The governor said his grandfather came back to the U.S. and got a degree from an HBCU in Pennsylvania, became a minister, like his great-grandfather, and became "the first Black minister in the history of the Dutch Reformed Church."

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"I know my family's history. So if some blog has a question about the Klan's history, maybe they should ask the Ku Klux Klan," he added.

Moore shot back at the Free Beacon in a social media post to X and wrote, "I know my family’s history. The @FreeBeacon can ask the KKK about theirs."

Andrew Kerr, the Free Beacon reporter who wrote the piece about Moore's great-grandfather, responded on X by saying, "Read all about Wes Moore's family history right here!" He then provided a link to his original reporting. 

The outlet's reporting from early February cited church records, as well as newspaper coverage, that indicate Moore's great-grandfather, Thomas, transferred from South Carolina to Jamaica, where he was born, on Dec. 13, 1924.

Thomas, according to the report, was set to succeed a Jamaican pastor who had passed away a week earlier.