State Sen. Scott Wagner, a York County Republican running for governor, has been videotaped lambasting a billionaire donor George Soros.
Mr. Wagner was attending the Pittston Tomato Festival in Luzerne County on Saturday when a tracker from the Pennsylvania Democratic Party started filming him in the crowd.
Mr. Wagner, who just that day had published an op-ed piece knocking Democrats for suggesting he was too slow to respond to the violence sparked by a white-supremacist march in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. 12, started talking about Mr. Soros, the billionaire conservatives love to hate for making major financial donations to liberal political campaigns.
Mr. Wagner, in the video, called Soros a “Hungarian Jew” who “made a fortune” but has a “hatred for America.”
The tracker tried to keep Wagner talking, but his campaign staff intervened.
“This is exactly what they want,” a staffer told Mr. Wagner. “You’re just feeding into his bull–.”
This is not Mr. Wagner’s first tangle with a tracker. He snatched a camera from a tracker from American Bridge 21st Century in May, setting off a controversy.
Wagner said that tracker was trespassing in a private country club. American Bridge said Wagner assaulted its tracker. The state Attorney General’s Office said “both men acted inappropriately” and dropped the matter.
The liberal-leaning American Bridge received $4 million from Mr. Soros from 2012 to 2015 and $80,000 two weeks after Mr. Wagner’s run-in with the group’s tracker.
We asked Mr. Wagner why he engages with trackers, who are always on the lookout for a slipup.
“This can be really vicious and brutal,” Mr. Wagner said. “I’m trying to bring a little humor into it.”
Mr. Wagner, 61, said he is not anti-Semitic, describing his decades of involvement in and financial donations to a York Jewish community center, where he learned to swim when he was 5.
He could not explain why he claims Mr. Soros, an American citizen since 1961, hates this country.
Mr. Wagner, who said he has made more than $1 million in political donations, acknowledged that he and Soros both came from humble beginnings, became wealthy, and now use their money to support people for public office.
Mr. Wagner, a big fan of President Donald Trump, even conceded that the arc of his business success more closely matches Soros’ career than that of Trump, born to a wealthy New York family running a real estate business.
But why does he claim Mr. Soros hates America?
“We have very different, polar-opposite beliefs,” Mr. Wagner said about Mr. Soros.
First Published: August 25, 2017, 12:10 p.m.
