J.D. Vance shared pet-eating claims after being told 'point blank' they were lies: report

A representative for J.D. Vance was told "point blank" that the Republican vice presidential nominee's claims about Haitian immigrants in Ohio were not true, but he continued to smear them anyway as bomb threats were called in to local schools and government offices.

The Republican senator posted about the rumors on X, where he's got 1.9 million followers, and he did not delete the post even after one of his staffers called Springfield city manager Bryan Heck on the morning of Sept. 9 to ask whether Haitian immigrants were stealing and eating cats and dogs, as other social media users had alleged, reported the Wall Street Journal.

“He asked point-blank: ‘Are the rumors true of pets being taken and eaten?’” Heck told the newspaper. “I told him no. There was no verifiable evidence or reports to show this was true. I told them these claims were baseless.”

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Donald Trump amplified those baseless claims on the largest possible stage at the Sept. 10 presidential debate, where he blurted out the rumors after Kamala Harris seemingly rattled him by pointing out that some of his rally goers appeared to leave early "out of exhaustion and boredom."

"The people that came in, they’re eating the cats," Trump said during the debate. "They’re eating, they’re eating, the pets of the people that live there. And this is what’s happening in this country.”

The rumors originated in a private Facebook post by a Springfield woman who heard the claims third-hand and later disavowed them, according to the misinformation research outfit NewsGuard, and a member of the local white supremacist group Blood Tribe was removed from a city council meeting Aug. 27 for making the same claims that Trump later boosted from the debate stage.

“It is depressing as a fact checker,” said Bill Adair, founder of the fact-checking website PolitiFact and a Duke University professor. “We like to think that fact-checks will stop elected officials and candidates from repeating false claims or at least persuade people that these false claims have no truth to them. [But] lying is really an economy. Politicians lie because they think it pays off.”

Vance has admitted the claims are false, but he continues to make dubious and debunked claims about Haitian immigrants in the state he represents in the U.S. Senate, such as his claim that communicable diseases have spiraled out of control in Springfield.

"Information from the county health department, however, shows a decrease in infectious disease cases countywide, with 1,370 reported in 2023 — the lowest since 2015," the Journal reported. "The tuberculosis case numbers in the county are so low (four in 2023, three in 2022, one in 2021) that any little movement can bring a big percentage jump. HIV cases did increase to 31 in 2023, from 17 in 2022 and 12 in 2021. Overall, sexually transmitted infection cases decreased to 965 in 2023, the lowest since 2015."

Another claim by Vance fell apart after a spokesperson provided the Journal reporter with a police report involving a woman who alleged that a Haitian immigrant may have taken her cat.

"But when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore’s house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later — found safe in her own basement," the newspaper reported. "Kilgore, wearing a Trump shirt and hat, said she apologized to her Haitian neighbors with the help of her daughter and a mobile-phone translation app."