Republican vice presidential contender J.D. Vance turned the tables on a loaded question about election integrity during a recent interview with the New York Times.

“Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?” asked the NYT’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro. “Let me ask you a question. Is it okay that big technology companies censored the Hunter Biden laptop story, which independent analysis have said it cost Donald Trump millions of votes?” Vance answered, pointing to Facebook and Twitter’s infamous decision to censor the bombshell story just weeks before the 2020 election.

Both Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey have admitted that intelligence officials pressured them to censor the story after claiming it contained “hallmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.” Several polls have found that the government-aided censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story had a significant impact on the election, including one from the New Jersey-based Technometrica Institute of Policy and Politics that found nearly for in five Americans believe “truthful” reporting of the story would have tilted the election to Trump.

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Garcia-Navarro attempted to sidestep this fact by once again asking Vance whether his running mate lost the 2020 election. “Did big technology companies censor a story that independent studies have suggested would have cost Trump millions of votes? I think that’s the question,” the Ohio Republican shot back.

“Senator Vance, I’m going to ask you again, did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?” an annoyed Garcia-Navarro once again asked. “And I’ve answered your question with another question. You answer my question and I’ll answer yours,” Vance replied.

“You’re repeating a slogan rather than engaging with what I’m saying, which is that when our own technology firms engage in industrial-scale censorship, by the way, backed up by the federal government in a way that independent studies suggest affect the votes, I’m worried about Americans who feel like there were problems in 2020,” he continued.

“I’m not worried about the slogan that people throw. ‘Well, every court case went this way.’ I’m talking about something very discreet, a problem of censorship in this country that I do think affected things in 2020, and more importantly, that led to Kamala Harris’s governance, which has screwed this country up in a big way.”

When asked whether he would have certified the 2020 election — which former Vice President Mike Pence opted to do without a thorough investigation of fraud allegations — Vance indicated that he would not have. “I’ve said that I would have voted against certification because of the concern that I just raised,” he said.

“When you have technology companies censoring Americans at a mass scale in a way that, again, independent studies have suggested affect the vote. I think that it’s right to protest against that, to criticize that, and that’s a totally reasonable thing.”

The Republican nominee also rejected the notion that the Trump-Vance Campaign is standing in the way of a “peaceful transfer of power” in January. “Well, first of all, of course, we commit to a peaceful transfer of power. We are going to have a peaceful transfer of power. I of course believe that peaceful transfer of power is going to make Donald Trump the next president of the United States. But if there are problems, of course, in the same way that Democrats protested in 2004 and Donald Trump raised issues in 2020, we’re going to make sure that this election counts, that every legal ballot is counted,” Vance said.

“We’ve filed almost 100 lawsuits at the RNC to try to ensure that every legal ballot has counted. I think you would maybe criticize that. We see that as an important effort to ensure election integrity, but certainly we’re going to respect the results in 2024 and I feel very confident they’re going to make Donald Trump the next president.”

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