Congressman bows out after affair with ISIS bride
The “Tinder Swindler” has some competition in the “romantic entanglement gone wrong” department this week. Congressman Van Taylor, Republican from Texas, has just announced he’s ending his re-election campaign, which the Texas Tribune reports he had in the bag with 49 percent of the primary vote. The reason? According to Breitbart, Taylor had an affair with Tania Joya, a so-called “ISIS bride.” Cockburn notes that the details are sordid. Joya had been married to the late John Georgelas, an American who had converted to Islam, embraced jihad, joined ISIS and was reported to have been killed in Syria in 2017. Joya says Taylor paid her $5,000 to keep the affair quiet and provided Breitbart with bank records that appear to prove that Taylor did, indeed, make such a deposit.
