Loeffler hits back at Ossoff over KKK attack

“She is stooping to these vicious personal attacks to distract from the fact that she’s been campaigning with a former member of the Ku Klux Klan,” Ossoff said. “We deserve better than that here in Georgia.”

Loeffler, who said she didn’t know who the former Klansman was when she snapped a photo with him and that he was later removed from her event, shot back that Ossoff — who is facing her fellow Republican Sen. David Perdue — lacks credibility.

“Every Georgian knows that Jon Ossoff is a pathological liar. And he’s a trust-fund socialist who’s never had a job, other than through the Chinese Communist Party,” Loeffler said, echoing a debunked claim by Perdue about Ossoff’s income.

Loeffler then turned her attention to her rival in the special election, Warnock, who was arrested in 2002 for allegedly obstructing a police investigation into child abuse claims at a Maryland camp he ran. The charges were dropped, blamed on a “miscommunication” and, The Baltimore Sun reported at the time, Warnock was not suspected of abuse and was later deemed helpful to investigators. A former camper, now 30, told The Washington Free Beacon in a story published this week that he had had urine thrown on him and was forced to sleep outside at one point.

Warnock has also been under fire for a domestic dispute involving his now-former wife, who in March accused him of running over her foot with his car. Police at the time determined her foot showed no signs of such an injury, and her lawyer told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that she wanted her privacy. On Wednesday, the National Republican Senatorial Committee released a TV ad that called Warnock a phony and featured police body camera footage of the incident where his former wife called Warnock “a great actor.”

Loeffler referenced that incident, as well, in addressing Ossoff’s comments about her.

“If he’s going to bring up lies about who I’m campaigning with, I’m going to talk about the truth about who he’s campaigning with,” she said. “He’s campaigning with Raphael Warnock, who has a past with child abuse and domestic abuse, who has celebrated Jeremiah Wright, Karl Marx, Fidel Castro, James Cone, Louis Farrakhan. He’s attacked our police, our military. He’s attacked Israel, small businesses and every single Georgian.”

There’s no evidence that Warnock “celebrated” Marx, Castro or Farrakhan, although Warnock had written that the “Marxist Critique has much to teach the black church,” Castro did speak at a New York City church where Warnock was a youth pastor in 1995, and Warnock had called Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam “important for the development of Black theology.”

Warnock’s and Ossoff’s campaigns have denied they’re socialists, and Warnock has previously called Loeffler’s attacks on him misleading. Warnock did not clearly denounce socialism and Marxism when Loeffler asked him to do so at their only debate last month, although he said he believes “in our free-enterprise system.”