A Republican Super PAC has just launched a new ad in Pennsylvania hitting John Fetterman for pulling a shotgun on an unarmed black man back when he was mayor.
Here’s the ad:
Here’s more from Newsmax:
American Leadership Action, a super PAC aligned with Pennsylvania GOP Senate nominee Dr. Mehmet Oz, launched an ad campaign to target his Democrat rival, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, for a 2013 incident in which he grabbed a shotgun and chased a Black jogger he had wrongly believed was involved in a shooting incident.
The $500,000 ad buy will appear only on stations in Philadelphia and will air on news channels such as MSNBC, CNN, and Fox News as well as other cable networks, the The Philadelphia Inquirer reported Thursday.
In the ad, which started running on Tuesday, the voiceover says Fetterman “chased down an innocent, unarmed Black man.”
The incident occurred in 2013 when Fetterman was the mayor of Braddock, Pa., a city in the western part of the state.
Fetterman said at the time that he heard shots near his home and that after rushing his then-4-year-old son into the house and calling the police, he got in his truck and chased the man. He then held the man there, confronting him with a 20-gauge shotgun, until police arrived.
In the advertisement, footage of the jogger, Christopher Miyares, who was not involved in the shooting, says Fetterman pointed his gun at his chest, which Fetterman denies.
Fetterman has refused to apologize for the incident and said he was acting in his capacity as his city’s chief law enforcement official while responding to a “chaotic” situation.
He was attacked over the issue while seeking the Democrat nomination, but those opponents didn’t air ads against him over it.
Instead, his competition, U.S. Rep. Conor Lamb and State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, of Philadelphia, demanded he apologize and warned that the matter could hurt their party’s chances in the November election.
But with the targeted ad buys in Philadelphia, which has a large Black and Democrat population, the super PAC is focusing on specific demographics, according to Chris Nicholas, a Republican consultant in Harrisburg.
I don’t know if this will truly hurt Fetterman the way it would a Republican, but given the toxic nature of race relations in some areas of the country, I guess it’s worth a shot.