Vivek Ramaswamy Lies Controversy Ohio

Vivek Ramaswamy Asked How Many Federal Agents Were on the Planes That Hit the Twin Towers. Then He Told CNN He'd Been Misquoted, and The Atlantic Released the Tape.

Ramaswamy said it was legitimate to ask whether federal agents were aboard the 9/11 planes, and admitted he had no evidence. When the quote made news he said it was wrong. CNN's fact-checker reviewed the audio and found the only thing left out was a five-word fragment.

MAGA Report Cards · Sep 12, 2026

Vivek Ramaswamy Asked How Many Federal Agents Were on the Planes That Hit the Twin Towers. Then He Told CNN He'd Been Misquoted, and The Atlantic Released the Tape.

Nineteen al-Qaeda hijackers boarded four American airliners on the morning of September 11, 2001, and murdered nearly 3,000 people. A bipartisan commission created by Congress named every one of them, reconstructed how they got on the planes, and published the account.

In 2023, while running for president, Vivek Ramaswamy told The Atlantic that Americans should be asking a different question about those planes.

"I think it is legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers," he said.

There is no evidence any were. Ramaswamy said so himself, in the same breath.

"Maybe the answer is zero. It probably is zero for all I know, right? I have no reason to think it was anything other than zero," he said. "But if we're doing a comprehensive assessment of what happened on 9/11, we have a 9/11 commission, absolutely that should be an answer the public knows the answer to."

Three years later, he is the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio.

What he did with a theory he admitted he had no evidence for

Read the structure of that quote, because the structure is the whole trick.

He raises an extraordinary claim. He concedes he has nothing to support it. Then he flips the burden — the government should have to prove it didn't happen, and the fact that nobody has formally disproven it becomes the reason to keep asking.

Earlier that same month, asked directly whether 9/11 was an "inside job" or happened the way the government described, Ramaswamy answered: "I don't believe the government has told us the truth." He told The Atlantic: "I want the truth about 9/11."

The truth about 9/11 is not missing. The 9/11 Commission identified the hijackers, traced their movements, and documented how each of the four hijackings unfolded — American Airlines Flight 11 and United Airlines Flight 175 into the World Trade Center, American Airlines Flight 77 into the Pentagon, and United Airlines Flight 93 into a Pennsylvania field after the passengers and crew fought back.

There have been real, unresolved questions about whether people connected to the Saudi government helped some of the hijackers beforehand, and documents about those contacts have kept surfacing for two decades. That is a genuine line of inquiry, and it is not the one Ramaswamy opened. Saudi contacts on the ground are not evidence of American federal agents in the cabins.

He said the quote was wrong. It wasn't.

The remarks drew national criticism. On August 21, 2023, CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins read the quote back to him on air.

Ramaswamy denied it.

"I am telling you the quote is wrong, actually," he said. He claimed the reporter had refused to share the recording. He said his comments about federal agents had been about January 6, 2021, not September 11, 2001.

"The truth is there are lies the government has told about 9/11, but it's not the ones that somebody put in my mouth," he told CNN.

The Atlantic released the unedited audio the next day.

On the tape, Ramaswamy says it. He says it in the words the magazine printed. He introduces 9/11 himself while discussing government agents, says "on the planes," ties it to the 9/11 Commission, and comes back to 9/11 later in the same conversation.

CNN's Daniel Dale reviewed the recording and found that Ramaswamy had not been misquoted, and that The Atlantic had kept his comments in context. The only thing the published quote left out was a five-word abandoned clause — "Like, I think we want…" — that changed nothing about what he said.

Ramaswamy had gone on national television and said a reporter fabricated his words. A tape existed. It didn't.

Then the defense changed

Once the audio was public, the misquote claim was unusable. His campaign switched to a different one.

Spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin argued Ramaswamy had been taken "out of context" — without explaining what context in the fuller recording made the remarks better. The fuller recording made them longer, not different.

And Ramaswamy never took it back. On September 11, 2023, he went to Ground Zero for the anniversary of the attacks. At a Fire Department of New York pipe-and-drum tribute in Lower Manhattan, he addressed the remarks: "So today's not the day to talk about the comments I made, which I stand by. But it is important to have a government that tells the truth to its people, that people can trust, and trust its people back."

He said it standing on the site.

He is asking Ohio for the state government now

This is not a stray comment from a candidate nobody remembers. It is a documented sequence: a baseless theory about federal agents on the 9/11 planes, an admission he had no evidence, a false claim of being misquoted, a recording that disproved it, a shifted excuse, and a refusal to retract.

That sequence is a pattern with him. He spent months of this campaign refusing to tell Ohio what he actually stands for while running attack ads, until a newsroom wore him down for a single answer. Cleveland.com found that the $10 million in ads he ran blaming Amy Acton for Ohio's COVID rules overstated her part in calling off the 2020 primary and left out his own pandemic record.

And on 9/11 itself, the accountability question in Congress has never been about who was on the planes. It has been about who paid for the people who ran toward them. Twenty-six Republicans with a report card on this site voted to block health care for 9/11 first responders, and thirteen of the House members among them voted no again on the deal that finally passed.

What the record shows

In 2023, Vivek Ramaswamy said publicly that it was "legitimate" to ask how many federal agents were aboard the planes that struck the World Trade Center, while acknowledging he had no evidence any were. When the quote drew national criticism, he told CNN on air that the quote was "wrong" and that the reporter had put words in his mouth. The Atlantic released the unedited audio the following day, CNN's fact-checker found he had not been misquoted and that the only omission was a five-word unfinished fragment, and his campaign then switched to arguing he had been taken out of context. Three weeks later he stood at Ground Zero and said he stood by the remarks. He is now the Republican nominee for governor of Ohio.