The GOP’s Pro-Secession Candidate for Maryland AG Said 9/11 Was an Inside Job

Michael Peroutka, the Republican candidate for attorney general in Maryland who has ties to a prominent neo-Confederate group, hosted a series of radio shows in which he claimed 9/11 was an inside job, CNN reported Sunday.

The 2006 five-part series ran on a radio show Peroutka hosted called “The American View,” and questioned whether the 2001 attack on New York City’s World Trade Center was carried out by an “elite bureaucrat” using pre-set demolition charges inside the buildings, a popular conspiracy theory about the attack attributed to (and taken credit for by) al Qaeda and its former leader, Osama bin Laden. 

“What happened on 9-1-1, I told you that I had been doing some research and watching some videos,” Peroutka said during one episode of his show uncovered by CNN. “And I said that if the buildings in New York City, the World Trade Center buildings, came down by demolition charges…if there was this evidence that there was that something was preset there, then the implications of that are massive.”

“I’ve been doing some reading and doing some studying, and I believe that to be very, very true,” Peroutka said during the show.

The “controlled demolition” theory has been debunked numerous times, including in a 2017 report by the National Institute for Standards and Technology, which found that that World Trade Center Building 7 collapsed due to fire.

Peroutka also questioned whether a hijacked plane actually hit the Pentagon on September 11. Peroutka said it was “very plausible that a missile that looked like a plane hit the Pentagon” and that he hadn’t seen any pictures of bodies at the Pentagon, and was therefore unconvinced that anyone actually died in the attack itself. 

Peroutka, who is facing heavily-favored Democratic U.S. Rep. Anthony Brown in November, is a former board member of the neo-Confederate group League of the South. In 2004, while running for president as the Constitution Party nominee, he gave a speech to the group during which he said he was “still angry” that Maryland was barred from seceding from the United States to join the Confederacy. 

He served on the group’s board until 2014. 

Peroutka’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment from VICE News, and a campaign spokesperson told CNN only that “primary election results demonstrate that Maryland Republicans are dissatisfied with their current leadership.”

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, a Republican who has come under intense criticism on the right from both Peroutka and GOP gubernatorial nominee Dan Cox, slammed Peroutka in response to the report Sunday.

“We know who was responsible for 9/11. Blaming our country for Al-Qaeda’s atrocities is an insult to the memory of the thousands of innocent Americans and brave first responders who died that day,” Hogan, who is term-limited, tweeted Sunday. “These disgusting lies don’t belong in our party.”