California Congressman Adam Schiff urges Facebook and other social media companies to testify in Congress about Russian influence in the 2016 election on their sites.
The interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday comes after reports that the Senate is considering calling on Facebook and Twitter representatives to testify on the issue. The Wall Street Journal also reported that special counsel Robert Mueller — who is leading the investigation into potential ties between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia — received more information from Facebook about Russian-backed ads posted on the site during the campaign than what was shared with Congress.
Schiff said that he was “distressed that it has taken us this long to be informed that the Russians had paid for at least $100,000 of ads designed to try to influence our electoral process.”
“We need to know the full extent of their use of social media to influence us from Facebook, from Twitter, from Google, from any social media or search engine,” Schiff said. “They need to be fully forthcoming. And I’m confident they will. I think, frankly, they need to come and testify before Congress because there’s a lot we need to know about this.”
Schiff also commented on Trump’s recent retweet on Twitter of an image of him swinging at a golf ball that knocked over a woman resembling Hillary Clinton.
“It is distressing, though, to have a president that, frankly, will tweet and retweet things as juvenile as that,” said Schiff. “It doesn’t help, I think, in terms of his stature. It doesn’t help in terms of the stature of our whole country.”
Watch the full interview above.