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.
“[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.
After Iowa police released the statement refuting the Ramaswamy campaign’s claim, Tricia McLaughlin, Ramaswamy’s senior adviser, posted to X, formerly known as Twitter, a photo and video of a person in a car flipping off Ramaswamy but not the actual collision.
“Suppose a guy wearing a MAGA hat is standing amongst protestors at a Democrat presidential candidate’s 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’s parked SUV,” Ramaswamy posted on X in response to the police’s statement. “I’m sure they’d be just as eager to call it an unrelated accident, right?”