Source: Politics<\/p>\n
Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy\u2019s campaign claimed Thursday that protesters ran into their parked car at a campaign stop in Grinnell, Iowa. But local police later said that\u2019s not what really happened.<\/p>\n
Ramaswamy\u2019s car, with no one inside it, was struck by another car in a parking lot<\/a> outside a coffeehouse. His campaign told POLITICO Thursday that two protesters hit Ramaswamy\u2019s car, but police say that the accident involved a driver unconnected to the protest.<\/p>\n “Our investigation has revealed no evidence to substantiate” the claim that protesters hit Ramaswamy’s car on purpose and fled, police said in a statement Thursday night.<\/p>\n Instead, police say that a woman had eaten lunch at a deli and backed out of a parking spot into the campaign’s rental vehicle. A report was taken and the driver was released with a summons for unsafe backing.<\/p>\n “[The driver] stated she was not in the area to protest, she did not know who the vehicle she struck belonged to, she did not intentionally back into the vehicle, and she did not flee the scene of the accident,” police said in a statement.<\/p>\n After Iowa police released the statement refuting the Ramaswamy campaign\u2019s claim, Tricia McLaughlin, Ramaswamy\u2019s senior adviser, posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, a photo and video<\/a> of a person in a car flipping off Ramaswamy but not the actual collision.<\/p>\n \u201cSuppose a guy wearing a MAGA hat is standing amongst protestors at a Democrat presidential candidate\u2019s event, then gets into his car with aggressive bumper stickers, flips off the candidate & screams profanities, lays on his horn, and then reverse-rams the candidate\u2019s parked SUV,\u201d Ramaswamy posted on X in response to the police\u2019s statement. \u201cI\u2019m sure they\u2019d be just as eager to call it an unrelated accident, right?”<\/p>\n