JD Vance Stands By False Pet-Eating Claims Roiling Ohio City

Senator JD Vance of Ohio, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, doubled down Sunday on the false claims that he and former President Donald J. Trump have spread suggesting Haitian migrants were eating pets in Springfield, Ohio, which has received numerous bomb threats in the days since the claims surfaced.

Mr. Vance said on CNN that the claims, which have been debunked by city officials in Springfield, had come from “firsthand accounts from my constituents,” and attacked the interviewer, Dana Bash, for fact-checking him, calling her a “Democratic propagandist” for connecting his and Mr. Trump’s words to the bomb threats.

“I’ve been trying to talk about the problems in Springfield for months,” he said in the interview. He went on: “The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

When Ms. Bash noted he had said “creating,” Mr. Vance replied, “I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it.”

The false claims about the immigrants in Springfield have exploded since Mr. Vance became the first prominent national figure to promote them last week, repeating them on social media. The Trump campaign quickly amplified them, and Mr. Vance subsequently acknowledged that “it’s possible, of course, that all of these rumors will turn out to be false.”

But Mr. Trump repeated the claims to an audience of tens of millions of people during his debate with Vice President Kamala Harris on Tuesday.

During the interview, Ms. Bash noted that Springfield city officials had asked national figures