Ron Johnson Derails Election Security Hearings To Amplify Biden Smear
Senator Ron Johnson, at a Senate hearing Wednesday that was supposed to be about election integrity, derailed the event to complain about being called out publicly for spreading disinformation about the Biden family.
After failing to bring any evidence to support claims of election fraud, Senator Johnson pivoted to the tired trope of attacking Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. In a feat of projection, he declared that Clinton, the Steele dossier, and the DNC were the real purveyors of Russian disinformation. In the first clip below, Chris Krebs, former U.S. Director of Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security, is responding to Senator Gary Peters, who has asked about the damage that election disinformation does.
A very heated moment between Ron Johnson and Gary Peters pic.twitter.com/e1zuGb9Kbr
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 16, 2020
Afterward, in the second clip, Johnson responds by attacking Peters, Clinton, and the DNC, specifically going after Peters for pointing out disinformation campaigns, and comparing this to when Peters and Senator Ron Wyden called out Johnson and others for a disinformation campaign centering on President-Elect Joe Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.
Johnson and others have attempted to use an IRS investigation into the younger Biden’s finances as evidence that wild stories about a laptop, emails, and other unsupported allegations, were not disinformation, despite there still being no evidence to support those claims.
In his Senate hearing outburst, Johnson reiterated and expanded upon this, suggesting that Peters was wrong to call him out for spreading disinformation before, and that this somehow negates that unsupported election fraud claims are disinformation now. In the second clip above, you can see Peters begin to respond to this, saying that Johnson and others shouldn’t be allowed to use their platform to mislead the American people, before Senator Rand Paul cuts him off to allege further, still without evidence, that there are credible claims of election interference.