Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) called out Breitbart News by name Monday when he asked former National Security Director James Clapper about “far-right” sites being “used in a Russian cyber-operation” during the 2016 elections.
“Do you have independent knowledge of the use of those far-right websites?” Blumenthal asked Clapper during a hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism on Russia’s interference American elections.
Clapper denied he had any information supporting the Senator’s assertion. “I don’t. At least off the top of my head, I don’t have specific knowledge or insight into that connection,” Clapper told the Committee. “Could have been,” he added.
Blumenthal read from a March report by the left-leaning McClatchy news agency that claimed the FBI was investigating Breitbart News, and other American news outlets were working with Russian bot networks to promote misleading stories in the leadup to November’s presidential election.
The article also aired such thoroughly discredited conspiracy theories as former Breitbart News Chairman and current White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon leading a “a white nationalist agenda” and former Breitbart National Security Editor and current White House-aide Dr. Sebastian Gorka being a Nazi-symphaizing anti-Semite.
Breitbart News is aware of no findings by the FBI or any other federal agency to support these allegations of collusion with Russian intelligence agencies. The primary source of the false “Nazi” allegations made against Dr. Gorka is his wearing a medal awarded to his father for bravery in the 1956 anti-communist uprisings in Hungary, in which thousands of Hungarians were slaughtered by Soviet troops and which forced Gorka’s family into exile in the West.
Blumenthal entered the McClatchy article into the Senate record in support of his allegations of Breitbart News’s “potential cooperation or involvement” with Russian intelligence agencies.
This is not the first time Blumenthal, who, in 2013, was ranked the Senate’s most liberal member, has lashed out at Breitbart News. In November, he issued a statement, decrying Steve Bannon’s appointment to a position in the Trump administration, in which he called Breitbart “a website that prominently features anti-Semitic, racist, xenophobic, and misogynistic rhetoric.”
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