A congressional candidate in Virginia has gone viral after sharing what appear to be happy family photos — but with him posing with a friend’s wife and three kids.
Derrick Anderson, a former Army Green Beret running for an open seat in Virginia’s 7th District, posted a campaign video with a shot of him beaming alongside a woman and three girls, along with another image of them at a dining table as if eating together as a family.
However, the Republican candidate has no kids — and only recently got engaged, and not to the woman in the photos. In fact, he lives alone with his dog, according to his campaign website.
Grabs from the video quickly went viral — with one tweet viewed more than 6 million times — after Anderson’s campaign confirmed to the New York Times that the images showed him “with female supporters and their kids,” which the Times said were the wife and kids of one of his longtime friends.
The newly engaged candidate, however, blasted the suggestion that he was trying to portray them as his own family.
“Derrick’s opponent and every other candidate in America are in similar pictures and video with supporters of all kinds,” his spokesperson told the Times.
The video has not been used in an official campaign ad but can be found on Anderson’s YouTube channel and a website paid for by the National Republican Campaign Committee.
However, many used the viral images to slam Anderson, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which accused him of “misleading” voters with “deceitful” tactics.
“Derrick Anderson is so desperate to mask his anti-abortion views and look like a family man that he’s posing for fake family pictures,” DCCC spokesperson Lauryn Fanguen said in a press release. “He’s clearly not above misleading Virginians and definitely can’t be trusted to represent them in Congress.”
Anderson’s campaign did not immediately return The Post’s request for comment Tuesday morning.
This is Anderson’s second run for Congress, after losing the 7th District’s GOP primary in 2022. The seat is occupied by Rep. Abigail Spanberger, a Democrat who will seek the Virginia governor’s office in 2025.
Anderson is running against fellow Army veteran and Democrat Yevgeny “Eugene” Vindman, who served on the National Security Council under President Donald Trump.
Vindman gained national attention in 2019 as a whistleblower in the first impeachment attempt against the former president, which was sparked by the Ukrainian-born candidate’s reporting of a phone call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
The Vindman campaign is facing an FEC complaint over alleged illegal coordination between his campaign and VoteVets, a PAC run by his twin brother. The complaint followed media scrutiny over the candidate’s military record, which led the campaign to refer journalists’ questions to his brother’s advocacy group.
