Daily Mail: “Vivek Ramaswamy Pocketed Cash from Notorious Nazi Reenactor”

Daily Mail: “Vivek Ramaswamy Pocketed Cash from Notorious Nazi Reenactor”

New reporting from the Daily Mail reveals that Vivek Ramaswamy accepted a donation from “notorious Nazi reenactor” Richard Iott.

Iott, who belonged to a Nazi reenactment group for years, donated $500 to Ramaswamy’s campaign last summer, who is now refusing to comment on the donation.

“Vivek Ramaswamy can’t focus on the sky-high costs or attacks on health care that are hurting Ohio families, because he’s too busy cozying up to Nazi reenactors,” said DGA spokesperson Izzi Levy. “Ramaswamy needs to explain to Ohioans immediately why he proudly accepted support from someone pushing these disgusting antisemitic beliefs.”

Daily Mail: Vivek Ramaswamy pocketed cash from notorious Nazi reenactor as his Ohio campaign hits the skids

• Vivek Ramaswamy, a 2024 presidential candidate now running for Ohio governor, is the latest Republican politician who has accepted a campaign donation from a former GOP congressional hopeful who liked to cosplay as a Nazi.

• The Daily Mail has learned that the Ramaswamy campaign accepted a $500 donation on August 15 from Richard Iott using public campaign disclosure data.

• Ramaswamy has struggled to gain traction in Ohio – a state President Donald Trump won with a comfortable 11-point margin in 2024. A December poll showed Democrat Amy Acton ahead of Ramaswamy by one point, in an Emerson survey with a plus or minus 3.3 percent margin of error.

• Several attempts to contact Ramaswamy’s campaign on Friday went unreturned.

• Iott was among the Tea Party-aligned hopefuls to try to enter Congress in the 2010 election, but his campaign was upended when the Atlantic published photographs of him in a 5th SS Panzer Division Wiking uniform.

• That division was part of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler’s military in World War II, mostly fighting along the Eastern Front, and assisted in the genocide of Hungarian Jews.

• At the time, Iott didn’t deny participation in the reenactment group.

• Republicans distanced themselves from Iott’s campaign, with the GOP’s highest-ranking Jewish member, then House Whip Eric Cantor, repudiating the candidate’s actions.

• ‘I do not support anything like this,’ Cantor told Fox News Sunday at the time.

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