Ramaswamy Calls CNN Host Collins 'Petulant Teenager'

Republican 2024 candidate Vivek Ramaswamy called CNN host Kaitlan Collins a "petulant teenager" in a social media post Tuesday following a contentious interview on the network.

"Hilarious interview with CNN last night," Ramaswamy said in a post on the social media platform X. "Felt like I was talking to a petulant teenager."

During the interview on Monday, Collins pressed Ramaswamy about a quote included in an Aug. 21 profile of the candidate in The Atlantic, written by John Hendrickson, regarding the possible number of federal operatives in the Jan. 6, 2021, protest, and violence at the U.S. Capitol.

"I think it is legitimate to say how many police, how many federal agents, were on the planes that hit the Twin Towers," he told Hendrickson in the interview. "Maybe the answer is zero. It probably is zero for all I know, right? I have no reason to think it was anything other than zero. But if we're doing a comprehensive assessment of what happened on 9/11, we have a 9/11 commission, absolutely that should be an answer the public knows the answer to."

He went on to say that, in a similar fashion, the investigators into the Jan. 6 incident should know the answer if federal agents or operatives were involved.

"Well, if we're doing a Jan. 6 commission, absolutely, those should be questions that we should get to the bottom of," he went on. " 'Here are the people who were armed. Here are the people who are unarmed.' What percentage of the people who were armed were federal law-enforcement officers? I think it was probably high, actually. Right?"

Collins, however, kept her question narrow to the point that he said federal agents were on the planes on 9/11.

Ramaswamy said that he was "misquoted" by the reporter and that her assertion did not take the full context of the conversation into account.

He told Collins that he believes there were "many [federal] agents in the field" on Jan. 6 and that the public "deserves to know who they are."

He said his point is that we now know the government lied about the 9/11 attacks, specifically about the participation of a Saudi Arabian national in the attacks discovered in 2021 after President Joe Biden declassified materials related to the event.

Following the interview, The Atlantic released a recording containing the questions and answers given by Ramaswamy at the time.

"We are grateful that The Atlantic released the audio after we repeatedly asked them to do so. The audio clearly demonstrates that Vivek was taken badly out of context and even this small snippet proves that," a campaign spokeswoman told the New York Post. "We continue to encourage The Atlantic to release more of the recording, rather than their carefully selected snippet, so that full context and reality is exposed."

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