Fox Business host slams Louie Gohmert for saying George Soros helped Nazis confiscate Jewish property

Fox Business Network host Stuart Varney Thursday morning denounced Rep. Louie Gohmert, R-Texas, for saying on his show that Democratic megadonor George Soros was a Nazi collaborator.

“In the last hour one of our guests, Congressman Louie Gohmert, for some reason went out of his way to bring up George Soros and made unsubstantiated and false allegations against him. I want to make clear those views are not shared by me, this program, or anyone at Fox Business,” Varney said on-air.

Gohmert was on to talk about Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s upcoming testimony next week before the House Judiciary Committee. The Texas Republican turned the discussion to Soros.

“Google is born in a free country and then they go over it and oppress others, help oppress in another country,” Gohmert said. “George Soros is supposed to be Jewish, but you wouldn’t know it from the damage he’s inflicted on Israel and the fact that he turned on fellow Jews and helped take the property that they owned. It’s the same kind of thing. Google coming from a free country and helping oppress.”

Gohmert, however, stood by his comments Thursday afternoon, sharing a “60 Minutes” interview that Soros gave CBS News’ Steve Kroft in 1998, in which the congressman says the liberal billionaire expressed “no regrets whatsoever” about assisting the Nazis confiscate property from Jewish people amid World War II and the Holocaust.

“My remarks were not anti-Semitic. Even the Israeli government has condemned Soros,” Gohmert told the Washington Examiner. “They were about the horror of his lack of remorse over his actions. It was a pro-Jewish statement on my part and supportive of the statement that the Israeli government made last year that anti-Soros statements are not anti-Semitic because George Soros ‘continuously undermines Israel’s democratically elected governments by funding organizations that defame the Jewish state and seek to deny it the right to defend itself.’”

Soros, who was among the Democratic targets to receive a pipe bomb in the mail in October, was born in Hungary in 1930 to a Jewish family. He and his family survived Nazi occupation “by securing false identity papers, concealing their backgrounds, and helping others do the same,” according to his Open Society Foundations.

As part of their efforts to survive, Soros’ father, Tivadar, sent him in 1944 to live with a Christian Hungarian agricultural official, who they bribed to pretend the then-14-year-old was his godson. The official was involved with documenting the possessions of Jewish people who had either fled or been deported, and Soros accompanied his guardian on a trip to take inventory of an abandoned mansion.

When grilled on “60 Minutes” about the incident, Soros said he did not understand the magnitude of what he was doing as he was only a child.

“You went out in fact and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews,” Kroft said.

“That’s right, yes,” Soros responded.

“Was it difficult?”

“Not at all, not at all,” Soros said. “Maybe as a child you don’t, you don’t see the connection.”

“No feeling of guilt?”

“Whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator. The property was being taken away. So I had no role in taking away that property. So I had not sense of guilt,” Soros replied.

[Also read: George Soros-affiliated university forced to move from Hungary to Vienna]

Editor’s Note: This story has been updated to reflect Gohmert’s statement and to add details of the “60 Minutes” interview

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