Ramaswamy campaign blames protesters for ramming its car in Iowa. Police say that's not true

Presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy's campaign vehicle was hit Thursday afternoon in what the campaign said was an act by protesters but police say was nothing more than an accident involving a driver unconnected to the protest.

No one was hurt in the incident in which an unoccupied black Ford Expedition being used by the Ramaswamy campaign was struck by a Grinnell woman's Honda Civic outside a coffeehouse in town.

The Ramaswamy campaign blamed the collision on protesters who they said were angry about Ramaswamy's remarks on aid for Ukraine, saying they yelled and swore at the presidential candidate before jumping into a vehicle, ramming the campaign car and speeding off.

“Things clearly escalated,” Ramaswamy spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said. “(Ramaswamy) is used to dealing with protesters and handled it very calmly. So he was maybe a little more calm about it than the rest of us.”

But that's not what really happened, according to the Grinnell Police Department's investigation.

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The department issued a media release Thursday evening saying "our investigation has revealed no evidence to substantiate" the claim that protesters hit Ramaswamy's vehicle and fled.

Instead, the investigation showed that a patron had eaten lunch at Jay's 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 release said.

"(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," according to the release.

On Friday, the Grinnell College student news site reported that the Ramaswamy vehicle was illegally parked in a no-parking zone at the time of the accident and that it was moved to a legal parking space without telling police.

“They’re not supposed to be parked there,” Police Chief Michael McClelland told The Scarlet & Black news site. “And I don’t believe they told Officer (Dalton Kies) they were parked there during the accident.”

Immediately following the incident, Ramaswamy noted in a post on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter, that the rest of the peaceful protesters shouldn't be lumped in with the two who were responsible for ramming his campaign vehicle.

“Had a civil exchange with protestors today, right before two of them then got into their car & rammed it into ours,” he wrote. “Those two should be held accountable, but the rest of the peaceful protestors shouldn’t be tarred by the behavior of two bad actors.”

The Ramaswamy campaign, asked by the Des Moines Register at a campaign event Thursday evening to respond to the police's investigation, stood by their initial report that it was protesters who hit the campaign's vehicle.

"I'm very confident, as a witness," McLaughlin said. She said she had not spoken directly to Grinnell police.

The campaign sent a 15-second video clip to the Register that shows Ramaswamy walking in Grinnell, speaking on a private phone call while the driver of a blue Honda honks and appears to flip off the candidate.

McLaughlin said the campaign did not have video of the collision itself, and Ramaswamy said he did not see the accident take place. Jake Chapman, a former state senator who has endorsed Ramaswamy and was with the campaign Thursday, told reporters he witnessed the collision and said it was a protester who was "with I think her boyfriend."

Later Thursday night, Ramaswamy's campaign issued a statement reiterating that the Grinnell Police Department never contacted it, adding that they were "thankful no one was injured" and planned to share the evidence it has accumulated with the police.

“Without contacting anyone on Vivek’s campaign, or speaking to eyewitnesses including the campaign security guard, or reviewing video footage obtained by witnesses, the Grinnell Police Department this evening issued a statement suggesting that the individuals who rammed the SUV were not protestors," the statement read in part. "This is puzzling since video and photo evidence, along with eyewitness accounts — including the campaign’s security guard — confirm that the individuals were standing side-by-side with protestors before entering their car, used profane gestures and language and shouted from the car, and honked their car horn as they reversed their vehicle into the campaign SUV."

During the first Republican presidential debate of the 2024 campaign, Ramaswamy called it “disastrous” that the U.S. government was “protecting against an invasion across somebody else’s border” and argued Ukraine funding would be better spent on the “invasion of our own southern border.”

Grinnell, a small city east of Des Moines, is home to Grinnell College, a small liberal arts school with an enrollment of about 1,700 in Poweshiek County.

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This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Iowa police: Protesters not involved in crash into Ramaswamy's vehicle