Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy was already a millionaire by the time he accepted the Soros scholarship he previously said he needed in order to pay for law school.
Ramaswamy defended himself last month for accepting a $90,000 award from the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans, which was founded by Daisy and Paul Soros, the late older brother of liberal billionaire financier George Soros.
Ramaswamy said that after graduating from Harvard, he “didn’t have the money” to afford Yale Law School.
GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy speaking at the Nixon presidential library. (Francine Orr/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images)
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“There was a separate scholarship that I won at the age of 24-25, when I was going to law school in my mid-20s, in my early 20s, when I didn’t have the money and it was a merit scholarship that hundreds of kids win, that was partially funded, not by George Soros, but by Paul Soros a relative, his brother,” Ramaswamy said.
“And to be perfectly honest with you, I would have had to be a fool to turn down that scholarship at the age of 24,” he added.
Paul Soros and Coco Kopelman attend the American Ballet Theatre’s annual spring gala at Metropolitan Opera House on May 14, 2007, in New York City. (Billy Farrell/Patrick McMullan via Getty Images)
When Ramaswamy accepted the award in 2011, he was a first-year law student at Yale and had been working for several years as an investment analyst at the hedge fund QVT Financial.
In 2011, the same year he accepted the award, Ramaswamy reported $2,252,209 in total income, according to his tax returns, which he released in June. He reported a total of $1,173,690 in income in the three years prior.
“Vivek won a generic scholarship that hundreds of students win to attend graduate school,” his campaign’s spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, told Fox News Digital. “It was funded by a relative of George Soros who is long dead.”
“Vivek would have been a fool to turn down that scholarship – Anyone who would have shouldn’t get anywhere near the White House doing trade deals,” she continued. “In fact, there’s only one candidate that will be on stage Wednesday night whom George Soros has said he wants to win this primary – and it’s not Vivek.”
George Soros answers questions after delivering a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos on May 24, 2022. (Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images)
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McLaughlin was likely referring to comments Soros made at the Munich Security Conference in February.
Soros said he wanted Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis to win the Republican primary in the hope that former President Donald Trump would then mount a third-party campaign for president that would split the GOP vote and lead to a “Democratic landslide.”