Beto O’Rourke’s Mysterious Woman

American Thinker:

By Ronald Kolb

Robert Francis “Beto” O’Rourke recently announced his candidacy for governor of Texas against incumbent Greg Abbott after the former’s failed campaigns for U.S. Senate in 2018 and president in 2020.  One issue that has followed him was his arrest report of a DUI hit-and-run in 1998, released in August 2018 by the Houston Chronicle and San Antonio Express.  Up until that time, he had admitted to the DUI without mentioning the accident and fleeing the scene. 

During a debate in September with eventual victor Ted Cruz, a moderator brought it up, and O’Rourke said, “I did not try to leave the scene of the accident.”  Then he repeated a familiar comment before the report had been released: that he was given a “second chance” only because he was a white man.  Days later in the Washington Post, fact-checker Glenn Kessler gave O’Rourke “Four Pinocchios,” which qualifies as a “whopper.”  Just four days later, during friendly questioning by the Texas Tribune, O’Rourke was asked again whether he had fled the scene of the accident.  “I did not flee,” he replied, and the “police report is wrong.”  O’Rourke then added that he had recently “reached out to a passenger who was in the car,” and “she” said that “we did not try to flee.”  O’Rourke was not asked and did not volunteer who “she” was. 

Then, in 2019, soon after his loss to Cruz, when O’Rourke had announced he was running for the White House, he was asked again by Vanity Fair about whether he had fled the accident.  He now claimed that the mystery woman was “Michelle” and added that after he was arrested, police took him and his mystery passenger to a gas station and dropped her off (which would have been about three in the morning), and he gave her money so she could go home.  He spent the night in jail and was bailed out the next morning by his father, former El Paso County judge Pat O’Rourke, who before his death suggested that the young O’Rourke, then going by “Rob,” go back to using his childhood nickname of “Beto” if he wanted to succeed in politics in Hispanic-dominated El Paso.  After completing a diversion program, O’Rourke’s driver’s license was eventually returned. 

There are several problems with O’Rourke’s changing explanations. Read more