An Austin-based private jet touched down in Texas at 10:24 a.m. local time after spending the night in Ohio, according to flight records that Rhein Amacher cited online this week.
Hours later, Democratic U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico walked into the Austin City Limits Music Festival.
The appearance marked his first in-person public event in Texas after nine days away from the campaign trail.
His campaign says the flu kept him off the road. Independent journalist Nick Sortor has presented a different claim.
On Sunday, Sortor posted a video to X that included a roughly 47-second recording of a phone call. He and Amacher placed the call to the Lindner Center of Hope in Mason, Ohio.
The center sits near Cincinnati. The nonprofit runs inpatient, residential and outpatient mental health and psychiatric programs and provides treatment around the clock.
Sortor wrote that a hospital employee told him and Amacher that Talarico “had in fact been a patient” and left the facility earlier that week.
The recording opens with Amacher asking about the candidate. “So nothing for James Talarico?” Amacher can be heard saying.
A pause follows before the employee answers. “Umm… let me see it looks, well… it looks like he was just discharged this evening. That’s why I don’t have it,” the employee says.
Amacher presses further. “Oh he was discharged then?” he asks. The employee replies, “mm-hmm.”
Talarico spokesperson JT Ennis rejected the report in a social media post.
“This is a lie designed to promote a pathetic conspiracy theory. Last week James Talarico was home in Austin, Texas recovering from the flu,” Ennis wrote on X.
Amacher countered with flight data. The records he cited show a private jet based in Austin flying from Austin to Butler County Airport in Hamilton, Ohio.
The airport lies roughly 20 minutes from the Lindner Center of Hope.
He then addressed Ennis directly on X. “Bring the lawsuit. I welcome the discovery,” Amacher wrote.
Talarico’s campaign has tied the nine-day gap to illness.
Ennis stated that Talarico had completed more than 100 public events before he fell sick. “James came down with the flu but will be back on the trail this weekend,” Ennis said.
Talarico gave his own account on September 30. He joined a United States Hispanic Business Council event by video and told attendees he had visited an urgent care clinic in Dallas the night before.
He said the clinic diagnosed him with the flu. He also reported having a fever.
Talarico told the group he had reached his most contagious period after “shaking too many hands on the campaign trail.”
On October 9, he returned to public view at the music festival. There he spoke with a New York Times reporter about the illness.
He called it “a nasty case of the flu” and said he had been “home sick in bed.” He added, “Just a reminder not to believe everything you read on the internet.”
The two sides now rely on different evidence. Sortor and Amacher point to the phone recording and the flight records.
The campaign points to Talarico’s September 30 remarks, his comments to the Times and Ennis’s statements.
The source material for this report contains no statement from the Lindner Center of Hope.
As of this report, the campaign has not issued a public response specifically addressing the Lindner Center claims.
