Moore has faced scrutiny for making false claims about his academic, military, and family backgrounds
Democratic Maryland Gov. Wes Moore has embarked on a preemptive media campaign attacking his state’s flagship newspaper, the Baltimore Sun, for a forthcoming investigative series that will allegedly scrutinize Moore’s record.
“The Baltimore Sun used to be our paper of record,” Moore told former White House press secretary turned MS NOW host Jen Psaki, whose time as President Joe Biden’s top flack was marked by the cover-up of the president’s mental decline. “It’s now become the paper of the right wing.”
Moore, a prospective 2028 Democratic presidential prospect, has taken a public beating in the wake of news reports from the Washington Free Beacon and other out-of-state outlets that exposed a litany of false statements about his family history, his upbringing, and his academic, athletic, and military achievements. Now, the Baltimore Sun, together with a local network collaboration known as Spotlight on Maryland, is getting in on the action with a series months in the making that will apparently examine whether Moore exaggerated his military and athletic accomplishments beyond what is already known.
Spotlight on Maryland managing editor Candy Woodall said Wednesday that Moore’s team “warned” her privately in January that it would work to tarnish the Sun‘s reputation by sending “files to every media reporter” in the country if it continued its probe into Moore’s military records.
Moore’s team followed through on that threat this week, with Semafor on Sunday publishing a trove of documents provided by Moore’s office showing their communications with Sun reporters dating back to November. Though the documents shed light on the nature of the Sun‘s pending reporting and show that the Sun reporters believe Moore’s team has stonewalled their inquiries for months, to Semafor, they also reveal that Moore and his team believe that the paper is being weaponized by its new owner, David Smith, a longtime Republican donor and executive chairman of the Sinclair television network.
Moore’s senior press secretary, Ammar Moussa, followed up with posts on X on Monday saying the Sun and Spotlight on Maryland are engaged in “faux-journalism” and don’t deserve to be treated like news outlets, mirroring the sort of rhetoric Moore’s aides used to describe the Free Beacon when responding to reporting scrutinizing the governor’s provably false claim to have been a “foremost expert” on radical Islam and to his assertion that his great-grandfather was chased out of the country by the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s.
As for the nature of the pending joint investigation from the Sun and Spotlight on Maryland, the emails published by Semafor show it has been tugging on intriguing threads about Moore’s military service in Afghanistan in 2005, including allegations that the accomplishments credited to Moore in his Army Officer Evaluation Report were aggrandized as part of an effort “to help manufacture Moore into a candidate for future political office” in violation of Army Regulations and federal ethics rules.
That evaluation report, according to the emails, was approved by then Lt. Col. Michael Fenzel, a close personal friend of Moore who served as his supervisor in Afghanistan and, later, as a groomsman in his wedding.
Should the reporting materialize, it could prove damaging to Moore’s 2028 presidential aspirations, which may explain his decision to go on the offensive against the Sun even before its investigation hits the airwaves.
“The United States Army doesn’t question my integrity. The soldiers I served with don’t question my integrity,” Moore told Psaki on Tuesday. “But we are seeing how the right wing and these right-wing billionaires like David Smith is then using his wealth to be able to manipulate local media.”
“And they’re doing it to curry favor with Donald Trump,” he added.
The communications published by Semafor also indicate Moore’s office provided a heavily redacted version of the governor’s DD214 discharge paperwork to Sun reporters that created “unnecessary questions” surrounding his departure from the military. That document appears to be connected to an effort by Sun reporters to “seek definitive information establishing the legitimacy” of the Bronze Star award Moore received in late 2024.
Moore received his Bronze Star several months after the New York Times reported that he had falsely claimed to have received it in his 2006 application for a White House fellowship. Moore has Fenzel to thank for re-submitting his Bronze Star award application in 2024 during the final months of the Biden administration. “I’m so happy to be in a position to right a wrong,” Fenzel said during Moore’s private award ceremony.
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