Conservative Lawyer Clashes with Vivek Ramaswamy in Heated Debate

GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and prominent patriot lawyer Rogan O’Handley (popularly known as DC_Draino) found themselves embroiled in a war of words on X/Twitter. The heated exchange was sparked when DC_Draino publicly called out Ramaswamy for his controversial background and his flip-flopping on several critical issues.

DC_Draino questioned Ramaswamy’s integrity, shedding light on allegations that Ramaswamy faced earlier in his career.

In an X post, DC_Draino posted: “Yeah I mean sure he:

1. was affiliated with the WEF;
2. took money from the Soros family;
3. got rich in Big Pharma;
4. does massive deals with Pfizer;
5. pushed for masks, testing, and vaccines;
6. thinks Mike Pence did the right thing on J6;
7. thinks Trump is a liar about election fraud similar to Stacey Abrams;
8. never voted most of his adult life;
9. wants to re-enter TPP;
10. wants uncapped immigration (if they’re educated);
11. changes his positions weekly when called out.

But we should totally trust him to lead the MAGA movement b/c he called out Ronna McDaniel (like 99% of other Republicans have been doing for years).”

Following DC_Draino’s accusations on Twitter, Ramaswamy wasted no time firing back with a strongly worded response. Ramaswamy vehemently denied any affiliation with the World Economic Forum (WEF), a claim made by DC_Draino, and called it a “pathetic lie.”

“Don’t disrespect your followers by lying to them like the MSM. The fact that you’re still sitting here saying I was ever “affiliated with WEF” is a pathetic lie. I’m the only guy who sued them & won, while others traveled to Davos,’” said Ramaswamy.

“I was the only candidate on stage with the stones to call on Ronna to resign, while others deflect. I won a generic scholarship, not massive George Soros loans/fundraisers like multiple other GOP candidates. I’ve never supported the government favoritism showered on Pfizer. If you have pent-up frustrations at others, then see a therapist but don’t dump it on me – because your shtick is getting old,” he added.

In a swift response to Vivek Ramaswamy’s fiery comeback, DC_Draino continued to challenge the GOP presidential candidate’s claims with a follow-up tweet. DC_Draino addressed each of Ramaswamy’s points individually, aiming to counter his defense and maintain the pressure.

“1. You were listed on the WEF website and only sued to get off their website once you started campaigning. Thank you for confirming my original claim.”

“2. Thank you for confirming you took money from the Soros family.”

“3. I didn’t bring up Ronna, but I do appreciate you working with Benny to come up with that line of attack during the debate. If it weren’t for Benny’s debate prep, do you think you would’ve even mentioned it?”

“4. Your company Roivant entered into a massive licensing deal with Pfizer in December of 2022 while you were Chairman of the Board (you resigned in 2023). I noticed you didn’t deny this and cut our interview short on Candace’s podcast when I brought it up.”

“I also noticed you didn’t deny or even attempt to address issues 5 through 11, but that’s ok I know you’re a busy guy pretending to be America First while you try to drag us back into Obama’s TPP and flood our country with uncapped immigration (as long as they have college degrees of course).” DC_Draino responded.

1. You were listed on the WEF website and only sued to get off their website once you started campaigning. Thank you for confirming my original claim.

2. Thank you for confirming you took money from the Soros family.

3. I didn’t bring up Ronna, but I do appreciate you working…

— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) November 25, 2023

In a separate tweet, DC_Draino wrote, “People are asking for receipts so here’s a big 1 from Vivek’s book “Nation of Victims.” He may pretend to be a Trump fan now, but he wasn’t when he wrote this book. He says the 2020 election was *not* stolen & Pence did the right thing on J6. No more Judas Pence types please.”

🧾People are asking for receipts so here’s a big 1 from Vivek’s book “Nation of Victims”

He may pretend to be a Trump fan now, but he wasn’t when he wrote this book

He says the 2020 election was *not* stolen & Pence did the right thing on J6

No more Judas Pence types please pic.twitter.com/qJkmnaS5ZR

— DC_Draino (@DC_Draino) November 25, 2023

In a tweet to his subscribers, DC_Draino vowed to release more exposé against Vivek.

“Draino why are you going after Vivek? Isn’t he pro-Trump?” He’s not. He’s smart enough to know that’s an effective strategy to gain momentum in the short-term, but once he smells blood in the water, he will pounce on Trump and try to take his crown. Then he will try to move the MAGA movement center-left, splitting us in half. He is a globalist Trojan horse and I’m trying to awaken the MAGA base to who he truly is before this trendy grass fire turns into an uncontrollable forest fire But don’t worry, I’m saving my best fireworks for closer to these primary elections It gets so much worse than what I’ve already shared,” Draino wrote.

Below are some of the allegations of Vivek Ramaswamy that The Gateway Pundit previously reported:

“Ties” to George Soros

In 2010, Ramaswamy received the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans when he was 24, which helped him pursue a Juris Doctor in Law at Yale University. This fellowship was named after George Soros’s older brother, Paul Soros, a Hungarian-born American businessman and philanthropist, often called “the invisible Soros.”

Ramaswamy asserted that he never met both Paul Soros and George Soros.

“What is my connection with George Soros? Answer none, zero, indirect, zero connection with George Soros,” Ramaswamy said in a video statement posted in July.

“Back in 2010 – by the way, this was long before George Soros had completely fallen off the deep end and gone into progressive causes, funding what I perceive as disastrous and toxic prosecutors who are soft on crime, who I’ve also railed against.”

“In 2010, I won a scholarship when I was 24 or 25 years old and headed to law school that was partly funded not by George Soros but by Paul Soros, George’s brother. [Paul] made his money independently and who, by the way, is now dead, funded hundreds of people – hundreds of kids. I was one of them, to go to graduate school at the age of 24 or 25, back when I didn’t have a lot of money to do it.”

“If I had turned down that scholarship back then, that would have been so foolish that anybody that foolish probably should have no place anywhere near the White House doing trade deals on behalf of this country,” Ramaswamy added.

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, according to FOX News.

However, recent revelations regarding Ramaswamy’s financial records paint a different picture. In the same year he accepted the award, Ramaswamy reported $2,252,209 in total income, according to his tax returns. He also reported a total of $1,173,690 in income in the three years prior.

His campaign’s spokesperson, Tricia McLaughlin, defended Ramaswamy’s decision, emphasizing that the scholarship was a generic one that hundreds of students win to attend graduate school.

“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 told Fox News Digital.

However, Ramaswamy’s Wikipedia page was updated to remove information about his association with Paul Soros, raising questions about the transparency of Ramaswamy’s candidacy according to critics.

According to Mediate, Ramaswamy seems to have paid Wikipedia editor “Jhofferman,” to remove content from his page that Ramaswamy believed would undermine his candidacy in the Republican primary. A few days later, Ramaswamy declared his intention to run in 2024.

“According to the article’s version history, the editor removed lines about Ramaswamy’s receipt of a Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans in 2011,” the outlet reported.

World Economic Forum

Ramaswamy has also faced scrutiny over his inclusion in the WEF’s 2021 ‘Young Global Leader’ list published on March 10, 2021. Despite rejecting the award and repeatedly asking for his name to be removed, the WEF refused.

“The World Economic Forum named me on a list of so-called young global leaders. They did it despite the fact that I turned down their award. They kept my name on that list despite the fact that I repeatedly asked them to take it off because I did not share their values. I’m an opponent of it,” Ramaswamy said.

After two years on the list, Ramaswamy was removed by the WEF after he filed a lawsuit against the company earlier this year, saying, “This is an organization that does a lot of wrong and I’ve opposed it publicly and believe it should be held accountable.”

“Well, when they refused to do it, you know what I did? I sued them because I believe in taking action,” Ramaswamy said.

Stance on Face Mask

On the topic of face masks, Ramaswamy acknowledged that he made a statement encouraging people to buy masks out of personal responsibility early on in the pandemic, in opposition to government advice. However, he clarified that as the scientific understanding of masks evolved, so did his stance.

“I’ll admit it, my anti-government instincts got the better of me. Because I don’t know if you all remember this, but back in March, April 2020, when I put that tweet out, which said that we should buy masks based on individual personal responsibility or whatever it was that I said, that was in response to the government, including Fauci and the head of the CDC, laughing at people for buying masks and telling people across this country that they shouldn’t buy masks. I have inherently libertarian instincts,” he said.

“I’m skeptical of the government. I think the government mostly lies. And so when they were saying, don’t buy masks, I went the other way and said that, you know what? If the government’s going to tell me not to protect myself, then maybe we should be protecting ourselves. Well, as the facts changed, so did my opinions on it,” he added.

Role on Ohio’s COVID-19 Response Team

Ramaswamy’s alleged work with Ohio’s COVID-19 response team was also removed from his Wikipedia page at his request, a move that has raised eyebrows.

According to Mediate, “Also removed from the page on February 9, 2023 was Ramaswamy’s role on the state of Ohio’s Covid-19 Response Team. The editor recorded that Ramaswamy’s Covid-era work was removed from the article by the candidate’s own explicit request, while his Soros fellowship was deemed “extraneous material” by the editor.”

Connection with NIH

Vivek Ramaswamy has yet to respond to allegations that his company partnered with the National Institutes of Health to create a database of patients’ personal medical information.

“Regenstrief Institute, Indiana Clinical and Translational Sciences Institute (CTSI) and Datavant are supporting the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in a national effort to securely gather data to help scientists understand and develop treatments for COVID-19,” according to the news release.

“Regenstrief, Datavant and Indiana CTSI created solutions that will enable the linking of data from different sources without the identifiers, improving the quality and completeness of the information while still protecting patient identities. This process will make data more useful to researchers as they work to understand the virus and develop solutions to address it.”

“Datavant provides the privacy-preserving record linkage (PPRL) technology which underpins de-identified data contributions to the NIH COVID-19 Data Warehouse, including the N3C, ensuring patient records are shared safely, securely, and privately in compliance with de-identification standards. De-identified data linkages within and with the N3C will address the challenges of assembling comprehensive patient records in large-scale clinical research due to care fragmentation and data fragmentation.”

San-Francisco-based Datavant is a unit of Roivant Sciences that Vivek Ramaswamy owns.

Voting Record Shows He is Not a Registered Republican

GOP Hirsh Singh has brought to light controversial details concerning Vivek Ramaswamy’s political affiliations and voting history. Documentation obtained from the Franklin County, Ohio Board of Elections suggests that Ramaswamy is not a registered Republican but, rather, a registered “Unaffiliated” voter.

In an X post (formerly Twitter), Singh wrote, “Per documentation received by Vivek Ramswamy’s Franklin County, Ohio Board of Elections Vivek is not a registered Republican, but Registered Unaffiliated and never voted in a Republican Primary in his entire life.”

Voting records, initially posted by an account called Ohio Legislative Watch on X, show Ramaswamy did not vote in the Ohio state primaries in 2022 and 2023.

“Well this is awkward. GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, who lives in Columbus, is not a registered Republican in Ohio and has skipped half of the elections since registering to vote in Franklin County,” the account wrote, adding, “His wife is also unaffiliated and skipped the same elections.”

In August, Candace Owens hosted a heated debate between conservative influencer DC Draino and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy on her podcast, Candace Owens Podcast.

The podcast provided a platform for the two to face off directly.

DC Draino grilled Ramaswamy by calling out his flip-flopping on critical topics, including:

• Election Integrity: Ramaswamy initially did not believe the 2020 election was stolen through ballot fraud. However, he later appeared to change his stance.
• Support for Mike Pence: He supported former Vice President Mike Pence on January 6th.
• Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP): Ramaswamy expressed interest in re-entering TPP, a stance that DC_Draino criticized as being in contrast to America First principles.
• Immigration Policy: Ramaswamy advocated for “no cap” on educated immigrants.
• COVID-19 Vaccination: He initially encouraged everyone to get vaccinated but later expressed regret.

“And just like magic, Vivek changed many of his positions and now claims: -there was 2020 ballot fraud -only wants bilateral trade deals -regrets getting the vax,” Draino wrote on Twitter.

“But he stuck to his guns on “no cap” immigration for high-skilled immigrants Nobody has been asking Vivek the tough questions even though he’s a Big Pharma exec that appeared out of nowhere, so I did,” Draino added.

2020 Election Fraud

DC Draino expressed his concerns about Ramaswamy’s past statements, including quotes from his book that seemed to criticize President Trump regarding the January 6 incident and called him a loser.

Draino directly questioned Ramaswamy’s stance on the 2020 election’s fairness, and whether the election was rigged.

Draino said, “I started to dig a little deeper on Twitter, and I came across some passages from your book. And I don’t know which book it is. It’s one of the two. But it talks about January 6, and it says, “It was a dark day for democracy. The loser of the last election refused to concede the race, claimed the election was stolen, raised hundreds of millions of dollars from loyal supporters, and is considering running for executive office again. I’m referring, of course, to Donald Trump.””

The quoted passage is from Ramaswamy’s book Nation of Victims, published in 2022, in which he lambastes Trump for refusing to concede the election’s outcome, dubbing him a “loser” and and detailed Trump’s futile efforts to overturn the results.

Draino continued, “Do you think that the 2020 election was fair? Do you think that Joe Biden got the most votes in American history? Or do you think 2020 was rigged?”

Ramaswamy provided a comprehensive response. He explained the nature of the quoted passage from his book, which he claimed had been taken out of context. According to Ramaswamy, he was actually referring to Stacey Abrams.

“Those exact words I’m referring to, of course, Stacey Abrams, that was literally the opening paragraph of that chapter. And it turned out that those words were literally borrowed from a description of somebody else criticizing Donald Trump that I then cut and pasted,” Ramaswamy said.