The Montgomery County Republican Party in Maryland withdrew its support on Wednesday for a county council candidate who claimed that the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence agency, controls elected officials in the county.
The party, which endorsed Harold Maldonado in District 7 in June, decided at a meeting on Tuesday night to end its support for the candidate and not to include him in its 2026 voter guide.
“We reject as baseless and unacceptable his allegations that Mossad controls Montgomery County elected officials,” Dennis Melby, chairman of the party committee, stated. “We oppose antisemitism, bigotry and all forms of baseless conspiracy theories, regardless of who they target or the political cause used to advance them.”
“Political debate must be grounded in facts, verifiable evidence and respect for every Montgomery County resident,” Melby wrote. “Criticism of any government, public official or public policy is legitimate, but unsupported claims that a foreign intelligence agency secretly controls local elected officials are not.”
The heavily Jewish county contains about 45% of Jews in the state.
On Sept. 11, Maldonado wrote that “locally, Mossad controls the council and the executive” in a social media post in which he also said that the CIA and Mossad are the “forces behind 9/11.”
In 2025, Maldonado wrote that he was “highly suspicious about Oct. 7" and that Israel’s war against Hamas was “part of the greater Israel project,” a conspiracy theory that claims Israel is attempting to expand the Jewish state across the Middle East.
He has accused Israel of “ethnic cleansing,” “targeting Christians” and “genocide against Palestine.”
“We’ve said Mossad/Israel carried out 9/11 and other false flags in the past with actual proofs,” he wrote in October 2025. “Now we have more on them.” In the same post, Maldonado suggested that Israel was behind the murder of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.
He has also said that Israel and the Mossad were behind the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy and an attempted assassination of U.S. President Donald Trump.
Maldonado has also posted conspiracy theories that modern Jews are descended from Khazars and that former U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris “descends from Jewish slave owners but has buried it.”
Melby told JNS that “I wish I had seen it before.”
“When it was brought to our attention by another blogger, we dealt with it,” he said.
The party is made up of a “small group of volunteers,” he told JNS.
“But one thing that’s so serious is talk of antisemitism,” he said. “I was a college student leader in the 1970s, and there was never talk like that, and later a town councilman in Friendship Heights, Md. So many of our residents were immigrants from Europe and Russia, with stories to tell of the horrors that befell Europe, that it was easy to assume everyone was on the same page.”
“Some of my voters and residents even survived the concentration camps and told me about it,” Melby told JNS. “I never thought I’d see the responses I saw after Oct. 7 and never thought I’d see the activities on so-called liberal college campuses that happened after the attack.”
“It’s as if we live in two countries,” he said.
Melby told JNS that “this was such a serious subject we dealt with this situation as soon as we found out,” and the county will “be more careful” about candidates going forward.
“I think the only advice I have is deal with allegations as soon as you’re made aware, as we did,” he said. “For both parties. Better to correct errors than stay the course.”
Melby noted that the Republican Party has called on Democrats to denounce antisemitic statements by streamer Hasan Piker, former Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner and Michigan Senate candidate Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.
