While Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.) is under siege over a number of disturbing sexual abuse allegations as he struggles to keep his campaign for California governor alive, another rising Democratic star from Maryland is facing some headwinds of his own.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore (D), whose handlers like to portray him as the next Barack Obama, is said to be a contender for the Democrat presidential nomination in 2028. Except Moore has a problem – his past seems to be already catching up with him. For a Democrat, that in itself is really a non-issue. If the party doesn’t want your past to catch up with you, it won’t. A couple of phone calls to the right editors and producers, and the story gets killed. Word gets out, and the legacy media knows how to obey and whom to obey.
That’s not happening, though, with Moore right now. The Baltimore Sun has sicced its investigative “Spotlight” team on Moore, conducting what it describes as a “year-long investigation” into the governor’s record.
Once word got out that the newspaper was preparing to publish its reporting on the investigation, Moore’s handlers and other Democrat operatives attempted to squash the series, or at least discredit it.
A yearlong investigation by Spotlight on Maryland finds gaps and discrepancies in Gov. Wes Moore’s public record, military file and Bronze Star timeline. https://t.co/XioLnq6gV5
— The Baltimore Sun (@baltimoresun) April 12, 2026
MSNOW host and former Biden dementia translator Jennifer Psaki “interviewed” Moore ahead of the publishing of the series, seemingly as part of Moore’s attempts to get ahead of this story.
“It’s actually a very sad day because the Baltimore Sun used to be our paper of record. It’s now become the paper of the right wing,” Moore told the “circle-back” flack.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore responds to the larger context of the Baltimore Sun’s investigation into his military service. Since 2024, the paper’s owner is a Trump ally named David Smith, who is the executive chairman of Sinclair Broadcast Group. https://t.co/VIFBvicU1J pic.twitter.com/gjfx0orad8
— The Briefing with Jen Psaki (@PsakiBriefing) April 8, 2026
Moore was referencing the fact that Sinclair executive David Smith bought the newspaper in 2024. Smith is understood to be a conservative and a supporter of President Donald Trump.
That said, if you actually read the newspaper, you’d see that little has changed with the change in ownership when it comes to the generally leftist tone and focus of the newspaper’s news and opinion content. Still, it is worth presuming that had Smith not bought the paper, it likely would not be planning to publish the exposé on Moore.
This is a case when, if you actually do journalism and hold both sides accountable—not just Republicans—you’re the biased one. And so, the investigation is reported to be centered on Moore’s military record, his personal sports background, and other things.
Questions about Moore’s framing of his own history are not new. My colleague Scott Pinsker highlighted a Free Beacon report back in February. In that report, discrepancies in Moore’s story emerged. The governor had said that his great-grandfather fled Charleston, S.C., “because he dared to condemn racism, infuriating the Ku Klux Klan.”
Scott pointed out that a closer examination of the chronology would require Moore’s ancestor to have done all of this when he was six years old.
Moore’s version of the story was that his family’s patriarch, said to be a Charleston preacher then, took his family in the dead of the night to Jamaica.
Moore’s own story seems to have more holes in it than Swiss cheese. Moore served in the U.S. Army and was deployed to Afghanistan. Back in 2006, reports are that he was recommended for a Bronze Star, but he never received it.
Once he entered politics, his story on the Bronze Star “evolved,” shall we say. It’s expected that the Baltimore Sun will dig deeper into that.
Semafor reported that Moore’s military and basketball stories have raised questions:
The (Spotlight) team, according to records shared with Semafor by Moore’s office, is digging into whether Moore had exaggerated his military record, as well as his high school and collegiate basketball tenure. Beginning in November, the group from the Sun sent a string of letters and emails to Moore’s team with detailed document requests regarding the governor’s service in the Army, the basketball scholarships he’d been offered, and other questions about his youth athletic history and college and fellowship applications.
Semafor then added, “By February, the team had grown frustrated with what they felt was Moore’s reluctance. So one of the investigators, Drew Sullins, fired off a note to the governor’s communications director, David Turner”:
Governor Moore has said, and continues to say, that he is transparent in all things. The reality is that he has been anything but. He and his team (of which you are a big part) have failed repeatedly to answer the most basic questions about his time in the Army and his deployment to Afghanistan. This is hardly becoming for a public servant occupying the position of high elected office that he does. This lack of transparency suggests – to even the average observer – that he’s afraid of something (or several things) in his military background. In this case, Governor Moore’s silence is actually deafening.
So now, the immediate story now centers on Moore’s attempts to scuttle the story he does not want to come out.
Candy Woodall is executive producer and managing editor at Spotlight on Maryland, the team conducting the investigation. In response to Moore’s public statements, she posted on the X platform: “Democrats sure are putting in a lot of work to discredit a series before it’s even started running. That alone should raise a question: why?”
Then she spilled some dirt. She said, “In January, I was warned directly that if Spotlight continued its investigation into Gov. Wes Moore’s military records – and one of his superiors – that his office would send files to every media reporter to try and discredit us.”
“We saw the same playbook in 2022 when a FOX-45 reporter asked why Moore allowed claims that he had received a Bronze Star that he didn’t have at the time. His team accused the reporter and media outlet of bias and a smear campaign,” Woodall wrote.
Woodall then pointed out that the narrative changed two years later after the New York Times reported on the “Bronze Star Moore hadn’t received.” All of a sudden, a consistent, inaccurate claim became “an honest mistake.”
Fox News Digital reached out to Moore’s spokesperson, Ammar Moussa, for their side of the story. Predictably, he said, “In light of revelations that Sinclair owner and Trump-donor David Smith is personally involved in Spotlight on Maryland’s reporting, what is the extent of Sinclair owner and Donald Trump ally David Smith’s influence in the FOX-45 and Baltimore Sun newsrooms?”
Notice what Moussa did not say. He did not spend any time on the accusations. Instead, he blamed Trump, of course. That’s what Democrats do when they have nothing.
Regardless of who’s conducting this investigation, we need more of this, not less. But more telling is the fact that a lot of the usual leftist suspects are not coming to Moore’s defense. They are not trying to protect him, which would mean he may not be the rising star in the party he wants you to think he is.
This also reinforces that Democrat candidates are paper tigers. Once you shed any light on them for any length of time, their “imperfections” become impossible to ignore and cover up. Brew a pot of coffee. Between Swalwell and Moore, and who knows who else, the Democrats promise to give us more than our share of intrigue in the coming weeks.
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