Columbus, OH – A new New York Times report today details Bernie Moreno’s phony “riches-to-rags-to-riches,” “only-in-America bootstraps story” which he has made the “signature pitch” of his campaign to voters as part of a “calculated process of self-creation.” While Moreno repeatedly tells voters his family came to the United States with “absolutely nothing,” the report finds Moreno is lying about his family moving into a “cramped, two-bedroom apartment” and is intentionally omitting details of his “rich and politically connected family” and his parent’s “quick” success in America during his pitch to voters. 

This is the latest in a “series of inconsistencies” that are “dogg[ing]” Moreno on the campaign trail – including Moreno lying about his family “escap[ing]” socialism, lying about refusing to sell Chinese-made cars, lying about his business origin story, and lying about shutting down Cleveland State’s Confucius Institute. 

Read more:

New York Times: He’s Running for Senate With an Immigrant’s Origin Story. Here’s the Rest.
Jonathan Weisman, Patricia Mazzei and Simón Posada
May 12, 2024

• ??Bernie Moreno, the Republican challenging Senator Sherrod Brown in Ohio, tells a riches-to-rags-to-riches tale. But the reality isn’t so tidy.

• He is running for the Senate as an immigrant who made good, reaching out to Ohio voters with a stirring, only-in-America bootstraps story: arriving as a child from Colombia, taking a risk on a struggling business, and then turning it into a smashing success and himself into a millionaire 100 times over.

• …Bernie Moreno, the Republican challenging Senator Sherrod Brown, humbly calls himself a “car guy from Cleveland” and recounts the modest circumstances of his childhood, when his immigrant family started over from scratch in the United States.

• “We came here with absolutely nothing — we came here legally — but we came here, nine of us in a two-bedroom apartment,” Mr. Moreno said in 2023, in what became his signature pitch. His father “had to leave everything behind,” he has said, remembering what he called his family’s “lower-middle-class status.”

• But there is much more that Mr. Moreno does not say about his background, his upbringing and his very powerful present-day ties in the country where he was born.

• Mr. Moreno was born into a rich and politically connected family in Bogotá, a city that it never completely left behind, where some members continue to enjoy great wealth and status.

• Roberto Moreno, one of the candidate’s brothers, is president and chief executive of Amarilo Holdings, a major development and construction conglomerate in Bogotá.

• Another brother, Luis Alberto Moreno, after serving as Colombia’s ambassador to the United States, was elected president of the Inter-American Development Bank with the backing of George W. Bush’s administration. 

• The Morenos’ immigration narrative is also atypical in that they were not strangers to the country when they arrived: The candidate’s father, Bernardo Moreno Sr., had studied gastroenterology, earned a master’s degree in surgery and had done his medical residency all at the University of Pennsylvania, where Bernie Moreno’s eldest three siblings were born. His mother, Marta Moreno, had earned a degree from Stanford.

• In Colombia, Dr. Moreno had been the country’s equivalent of the secretary of health, and he and his wife enjoyed what Bernie Moreno described as considerable generational wealth on both sides: multiple properties, farms, servants, staff and a house in Bogotá so prominent that it was later converted to the German ambassador’s residence.

• Mr. Moreno, as a candidate for office, speaks often of the cramped, two-bedroom apartment in Florida where his parents and their seven children first took up residence. That first home, purchased in 1971 with a mortgage worth more than $300,000 in today’s dollars, was a three-bedroom condominium in a new, 15-story high-rise on the ocean in Lauderdale-by-the-Sea.

• The building was advertised as having “300 feet of your own private beach,” a “wide deck for sunning,” a pool, a putting green and a sauna.

• Within two months, Bernie Moreno’s step-grandfather had lent the family the money to move to a four-bedroom house in Pompano Beach with a pool on a canal, ocean access and a two-car garage.