Republican Sen. J.D. Vance of Ohio clashed with New York Times reporter Lulu Garcia-Navarro during an interview released Saturday, accusing her of “repeating slogans” instead of answering questions about censorship.

Vance appeared on the New York Times podcast “The Interview,” during which Garcia-Navarro brought up the disputed 2020 election. Garcia-Navarro repeatedly pressed Vance on whether he would have voted against certifying the results of the 2020 election. “Senator Vance, I’m going to ask you again. Did Donald Trump lose the 2020 election?” Garcia-Navarro asked after a back-and-forth with Vance, who replied, “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.”

WATCH:

Twitter blocked the New York Post from accessing its account and suspended other accounts, including the personal account of then-White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, claiming that an October 2020 report by the Post on the contents of a laptop abandoned by Hunter Biden in a repair shop violated its “hacked materials” policy. The House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government reported in July 2023 that the FBI knew Hunter Biden’s laptop was not part of a Russian “hack and leak” operation.

“I have asked this question repeatedly. It is something that is very important for the American people to know,” Garcia-Navarro claimed after a further back-and-forth. “There is no proof, legal or otherwise, that Donald Trump did not lose the 2020 election.”

“But 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,” Vance responded. “I’m worried about Americans who feel like there were problems in 2020. I’m not worried about this slogan that people throw: Well, every court case went this way. I’m talking about something very discrete, 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.”

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in June that Missouri, Louisiana and five individual plaintiffs lacked standing to challenge an alleged censorship regime put in place by the Biden administration.

Featured Image: Screen Capture/Rumble/New York Times