Matthew Dowd, the former Republican strategist who is running as a Democrat for Texas lieutenant governor, dismissed concerns raised about his deletion of thousands of previous tweets as a “conspiracy theory” during a heated exchange on CNN.
“There’s no conspiracy thing here,” Dowd said Monday during an appearance on CNN’s “New Day.” “It’s just cleaning up my files long before I thought about running in this race. But, again, it’s a typical Fox thing to turn to some conspiracy, thinking it has more meaning than it actually does.”
Dowd, who was chief strategist of former President George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection bid, announced his bid to unseat incumbent Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick (R) last week.
“The GOP politicians have failed us, especially the cruel and craven lieutenant governor,” Dowd said in a video announcement.
Dowd was pressed by CNN’s Brianna Keilar over a Fox News report that he deleted more than 170,000 tweets.
“This isn’t like emptying your email inbox, to be clear,” Keilar told Dowd.
“Brianna, you can Google Matthew Dowd and find out everything you possibly want to know about my history,” he shot back. “Everything I’ve said has been public for the last 20 years.”
Keilar asked Dowd again why he deleted his previous tweets if he knew it would “attract scrutiny and attention.”
“Fox News does this, which is dreams up some conspiracy theory as they always do … and then people begin to repeat it,” he said. “I just think we shouldn’t play into Fox’s new sort of conspiracy theories.”
Keilar said it was “an important question to ask,” to which Dowd shot back “you asked it and I answered it three times,” before the host moved on to another topic.