Maryland governor Wes Moore, now considered a serious prospect for the 2028 Democratic presidential nomination, got his big break in 2006. Fresh off a one-year deployment to Afghanistan, President George W. Bush awarded Moore, then 27, a White House fellowship, a prestigious, year-long internship during which he served as a special assistant to then-secretary of state Condoleezza Rice. It put Moore on the path to ultimately becoming Maryland’s governor, and he won the fellowship—in the turbulent years after 9/11—claiming to be a “foremost expert” on radical Islam thanks to his academic work at Oxford University.
“As a Rhodes Scholar, I took advantage of the opportunity and examined radical Islam in the Western Hemisphere,” Moore wrote in his application to serve as a White House fellow, indicating that he had graduated from Oxford in 2003 with a Master of Letters, or MLitt, in international relations. “I completed my degree with honors and my research has led me to be touted as one of the foremost experts on the threat.” The White House parroted the claim in a press release announcing the 2006 fellowship class, borrowing from Moore’s application to note that his Oxford thesis, which it said was titled The Rise and Ramifications of Radical Islam in the Western Hemisphere, had “earned him praise as one of the foremost experts on the topic.”
That a 27-year-old could claim to be a “foremost expert” on the Islamic threat based on a year at an American military base in Afghanistan and two years at Oxford could be excused away as an ambitious young man’s puffery. But on close examination, Moore’s claims of expertise and of being a serious scholar completely unravel, as do his claims, also on his White House fellowship application, that he was working toward an Oxford doctorate.
The problems start with confusion—which neither Moore’s staff nor Oxford’s registrars were willing or able to clear up—about when Moore completed his studies, when he received his degree, whether he submitted his thesis, and what the title of the work was.
In his White House fellowship application—which is public record—Moore wrote that he graduated from Oxford in 2003. But in the résumé attached to that application, Moore reported a different graduation date: June 2004.
Asked to reconcile the two dates, a spokesman for the governor didn’t provide a photograph of Moore’s degree, but rather, a “degree confirmation,” generated last week by Oxford’s registrar’s office, indicating Moore completed his graduate studies as a full-time student and “has been awarded the degree,” but has not yet been issued a formal certificate. The “degree confirmation” generated by Oxford gives another contradictory date, showing that Moore completed his full-time graduate studies in November of 2005, a full four years after he began his Oxford studies, though a master’s degree typically takes two years to earn.
According to Moore, by November 2005, the month when Oxford now says Moore completed his master’s studies, he was serving in the 82nd Airborne Division in Afghanistan. He also says he began working as an investment banker at Deutsche Bank in London in March 2004.
That’s just the beginning of the peculiarities and inconsistencies surrounding Moore’s graduate studies, which a spokesman for the governor, Ammar Moussa, dismissed—after several off-the-record conversations—by saying the Washington Free Beacon is not “engaged in journalism” and is “doing what they always do: manufacturing doubt about the accomplishments of a Black veteran, Rhodes Scholar, and public servant because it fits their narrative.”
The story does fit a narrative, Moussa is right about that. But it is one that is likely to be problematic for Moore, just as it was for Minnesota governor Tim Walz (D.) when he stepped onto the national stage. The narrative, backed now by well-established matters of fact, is that when you scratch the surface of many of Moore’s braggadocious claims, there is something off, something a little untruthful about them. Moore claims to have been a doctoral candidate after he received his master’s degree, for example, but he and Oxford declined to provide the name of his academic adviser or any evidence he was enrolled as such.
Moore may mock and dismiss reportorial scrutiny, or point the finger at those conducting it—perhaps he, too, can be a knucklehead at times—but when the Minnesota governor came under the klieg lights, those who asked questions were vindicated.
Moussa declined to answer a single question directly, including why Moore’s “degree confirmation” from Oxford provides a different title for his thesis than what he stated in his White House fellowship application.
According to the Oxford certificate, the title of Moore’s thesis was Radical Islam in Latin America in the late 20th Century and its Middle Eastern Roots. But in his application to the White House, and in all subsequent biographies, Moore says his thesis was called The Rise and Ramifications of Radical Islam in the Western Hemisphere. The reference to Latin America has been removed, creating the impression that Moore’s supposed expertise is on Islamic radicals in the “Western Hemisphere,” including their “rise” in the United States. The new title also removes the timeframe of “the late 20th century” (the 21st century was 6 years old at the time), making Moore’s area of study more timely.
The new thesis name fits well with the sense of urgency in the mid-2000s about finding Islamic radicals in the United States and would have made Moore a more attractive applicant to Bush administration foreign policy hands, who viewed Central and South America as incidental to the war on terror. So did Moore change the title of his thesis long after it was written and submitted? Or did he change the title and subject matter of his thesis before its completion and submission?
An Oxford classmate told the Free Beacon he remembers Moore from the time and recalls him expressing interest in radical Islam. “I remember him talking about terrorism in the Tri-Border area of Argentina, Brazil, and Paraguay,” said David Adesnik, the vice president of research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, who was named a Rhodes Scholar in 2000 and received a master’s and doctorate in international relations at Oxford.
The mystery surrounding the title of and content of Moore’s thesis could be resolved with a cursory review of the document. But that, too, poses a problem for Moore. His office could not produce a copy of the document since we began requesting it in early November.
And good luck finding it at Oxford’s legendary Bodleian Library, which archives all MLitt theses from the university’s graduate students. A senior librarian told the Free Beacon she couldn’t find “any trace” of Moore’s paper, because he never submitted it.
“I can see on his record that he has not submitted his thesis to the Bodleian, so they wouldn’t have a record of it,” Oxford deputy communications chief Julia Paolitto told the Free Beacon. “MLitt students are required to submit their thesis to the Bodleian in order to confer their degree at a ceremony, however as Mr. Moore has never had a ceremony this is not a requirement he would have needed to fulfil.”
Paolitto’s confirmation that Moore did not submit his thesis puts the governor in a tough position. Moussa, his press secretary, insisted that Moore submitted his thesis and said the Free Beacon would be spreading a conspiracy theory by suggesting otherwise.
“Wes Moore completed and submitted his thesis when he was at Oxford, before he went on to serve his country in Afghanistan and used his expertise in the White House, full stop,” Moussa told the Free Beacon. “Any insinuation otherwise is a desperate attempt by a partisan outlet to launder baseless opposition research into a ‘story.'”
“The Free Beacon isn’t engaged in journalism,” Moussa added, after speaking off-the-record with this reporter for a total of 36 minutes over the weekend. “We’ll continue doing the work for the people of Maryland while they keep digging for conspiracy theories that don’t exist.”
So long as Moore is unable to find a copy of his thesis and submit it to the Bodleian Library, he cannot walk at an Oxford graduation ceremony and obtain his formal master’s certificate.
The confusion about when and where Moore was when he was doing his graduate studies—along with the convenient change in the title and subject matter of his missing thesis—is part of a pattern of self-serving, self-aggrandizing, and not entirely true claims that have persistently dogged, yet heretofore not tripped up, the ambitious Democrat.
Moore claimed on his 2006 White House fellowship application, for example, to have been inducted into the Maryland College Football Hall of Fame, an organization that doesn’t exist; that he received a Bronze Star for his service in Afghanistan, which he had not; and that he was born in Baltimore, which he was not.
Moore, who was born in Takoma Park, Maryland, a comfortable Washington, D.C., suburb, and went to high school in Pennsylvania, said in August 2024 that his false claim to have received a Bronze Star in that 2006 application was an “honest mistake.” When Moore became governor, two decades after his service, he received the honor in a private ceremony at the governor’s mansion after a general who supervised him in Afghanistan, Michael Fenzel, a close friend who served as a groomsman in his wedding, “resubmitted” the needed paperwork.
The problems surrounding Moore’s academic claims extend beyond his missing and title-shifting graduate thesis. He also claimed in his White House fellowship application that he went on to become a doctoral candidate at Oxford in 2006, studying for a Ph.D. The prerequisite for doctoral work is usually the completion of a master’s degree. It also requires the cooperation and oversight of an academic adviser, and typically doctoral students are formally enrolled at the university.
But Moore’s office declined to provide the name of his academic adviser or any evidence confirming he was ever a doctoral candidate. Oxford’s Wolfson College, where Moore was admitted as a graduate student, the university’s Department of Politics and International Relations, and the Rhodes House all declined to verify Moore’s doctoral candidacy claim.
The questions and discrepancies surrounding Moore’s missing graduate thesis notwithstanding, his claim to be a “foremost expert” on the threat of radical Islam is ridiculous.
“I have never come across Gov. Moore’s name in the course of my academic life,” said the French political scientist Gilles Kepel, described by the New York Times as “France’s most famous scholar of Islam.”
Several other prominent academics in the field, including Lorenzo Vidino, the director of the Program of Extremism at George Washington University, said they’ve never heard of Moore in the context of any scholarly work.
“I have been studying political Islam in the West for the last 25 years and Moore’s name has never popped up on my radar,” Vidino told the Free Beacon. “It’s a small, niche field, I’d know.”
Former CIA case officer Reuel Marc Gerecht, now a scholar of Islamic terrorism at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, said he’s never heard of Moore in the context of his expertise in Islamic terrorism.
“If there was an up-and-coming scholar in radical Islam, if he had written something novel, then yes, I would certainly have heard of it,” Gerecht said. “This is news to me.”
Moore’s 2014 memoir, The Work: My Search for a Life That Matters, contains most of the known details on Moore’s supposed academic expertise.
There, Moore said he decided to study radical Islam in the Western Hemisphere when he was named a Rhodes Scholar in late 2000. Claiming some perspicacity, Moore wrote that after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, his “niche research area” had become “the entire world’s urgent concern.” According to Moore, when he was at Oxford, the subject was “too new and nebulous” and his research “couldn’t be done in libraries.”
Gerecht disputed Moore’s assertion that the study of radical Islam in the Western Hemisphere was a “niche research area” before 9/11.
“That’s not true,” Gerecht told the Free Beacon. “There was a fair amount of writing about Shiite militancy in the Western Hemisphere, particularly in Latin America. There was quite a bit of discussion about Hezbollah and the attempt to radicalize Lebanese Shiite expatriate communities.”
Scholars, journalists, and intelligence analysts had been closely focused on Western terror threats for many years, certainly since the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and earlier, in 1992, when a Hezbollah-linked suicide bomber detonated a truck filled with explosives at the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina, killing 29 people.
Still, Moore wrote that he had no choice but to travel the world to learn about radical Islam first-hand in between his classes at Oxford (the Rhodes Scholarship funds travel for its winners).
It was during these travels that Moore learned how to “code switch,” the future governor wrote.
“I hung out at mosques in southern Lebanon, spoke with government officials and shopkeepers in Syria, smoked hookah pipes with young revolutionaries in Cairo, and traveled down to Foz de Iguazu with a former Argentinean intelligence officer,” Moore wrote, adding that he accomplished all of this with a tenuous grasp on the Arabic language.
“I grew out the hair on the top of my head, let a patchy beard sprout on my face, grabbed my passport, and went,” Moore wrote. “I tried to be a silent chameleon, watching subjects, movements, and tendencies. I tried to fit in, despite my former college football player’s frame, the oddness of being a black man in some of the areas I visited, and the occasional Baltimore twang inflecting my broken Spanish or Arabic.”
“This is what I’ve come to think of as the code-switching bonus—a reluctant survival tactic for a kid from the Bronx or Baltimore turned into a life skill,” he wrote.
Moore, of course, didn’t live in Baltimore until he attended college at the elite Johns Hopkins University, where he’s unlikely to have picked up “a Baltimore twang.” While living as a child in the Bronx, he attended the exclusive Riverdale Country School, where John and Robert F. Kennedy also went. He left the school for a military academy after he was facing expulsion for graffiti and other infractions.
As evidence of his expertise, Moore said in his White House fellowship application that, by 2006, he had authored four articles and was “featured in two books on the threat of radical Islam in Latin America.”
His office could not locate the four articles. Academic databases, including Google Scholar and JSTOR, contain precisely zero articles by Moore on the topic of radical Islam, nor do the databases contain any scholarly works that cite Moore’s thesis or any other scholarly works as a source.
Moore did make contributions to two books, both published by the Council for Emerging National Security Affairs, a nonprofit think tank founded by Moore’s friend Fenzel. In one book, The Faces of Intelligence Reform, a collection of essays from junior national security leaders, Moore contributed a 773-word essay—not about radical Islam—praising the George W. Bush administration for establishing the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Moore produced no original research for the essay.
Moore’s contribution to a second book, Beyond The Campaign, was a researched essay about radical Islam in the Tri-Border region of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil.
Moore’s office pointed the Free Beacon to one of his sources for that essay, the journalist Sebastian Junger, author of the bestselling nonfiction book about Massachusetts commercial fishermen, The Perfect Storm, which was made into a George Clooney movie. Junger told the Free Beacon he spoke with Moore sometime in 2002 about radical Islam in the Tri-Border region. He said Moore “had informed questions, which is what every journalist or researcher hopes to have,” but declined to comment when asked if it is fair to characterize Moore as a “foremost expert” on the topic.
“I don’t know his body of work,” Junger said. “He may or may not be. I don’t have a basis for saying that.”
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