Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain

Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain[1] was a 527 Political Action Committee formed in 1997.[2] The group makes controversial allegations against John McCain concerning his time as a prisoner of war in Vietnam. The group was founded by Vietnam veterans Jerry Kiley and Ted Sampley.[2]

In 2000, Sampley called McCain a "Manchurian candidate" on his Web site and said that McCain was an agent of the Vietnamese, and in 2008, Kiley, who says he served in Vietnam for about a year, was behind a flier that claimed McCain was a "Hanoi Hilton songbird" who collaborated with the enemy. The fact checking website PolitiFact, quoting other U.S. prisoners of the Vietnamese, rated the claims “Pants on Fire” wrong.[3]

In 2004, Kiley and Sampley formed a similar group targeting another Vietnam veteran, John Kerry, who was running for the Democratic Party nomination for President of the United States. In May 2018, a Fox News analyst, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, was terminated from the network for reviving the debunked charges against McCain, calling the senator “Songbird John”.[4]

The group made a video in which Bob Smith, former Republican Senator from New Hampshire, Bob Dornan, former Republican Representative from California, former Congressional staffers and others made various allegations against McCain.[5] The group also disseminated taped excerpts[6] of McCain's questioning of Dolores Alfond of the National Alliance of Families before the United States Senate Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs.