The digital director of President Donald Trump’s campaign, Brad Parscale, said Friday he had accepted an invitation to testify before the House intelligence committee’s Russia investigation.
CNN first reported last month that House investigators wanted to talk with Parscale about the Trump campaign’s digital operation and question whether Russia aided an explosion of pro-Trump fake news.
“I am unaware of any Russian involvement in the digital and data operation of the 2016 Trump presidential campaign,” Parscale wrote in a statement posted to Twitter Friday. “I have accepted a request from the House Intelligence Committee to meet with them for a voluntary interview and I look forward to sharing with them everything I know.”
Democrats on the House intelligence committee are investigating whether Russian operatives used microtargeting of fake news stories to focus on voters in key swing states like Ohio and Michigan and whether they would have had any help from domestic political operatives. No evidence has surfaced yet to prove this connection.
“There have been reports that their ability to target this information, some reports at least saying that in the last week of the campaign in certain precincts in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania there was so much misinformation coming talking about Hillary Clinton’s illnesses or Hillary Clinton stealing money from the State Department or other. It completely blanked out any of the back and forth that was actually going on in the campaign,” Sen. Mark Warner, the top Democrat on the Senate intelligence committee, said at a March 30 hearing.
Warner then added, “One of the things that seems curious is would the Russians on their own have that level of sophisticated knowledge about the American political system if they didn’t at least get some advice from someone in America?”