Disinformation Czar Nina Jankowicz: American Elections Need ‘Single, Unifying Candidate’

Nina Jankowicz, who leads the new Disinformation Governance Board in the Department of Homeland Security, said in August 2020 that American democracy needed a “single, unifying candidate” rather than alternatives on the left or right.

Speaking to Alyssa Milano on the Sorry Not Sorry podcast, Jankowicz claimed there was credible intelligence that Russians were using disinformation to back Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and President Donald Trump, as they allegedly had in 2016.

“In 2016, we saw Russian trolls supporting not only Donald Trump, but supporting Bernie Sanders, supporting [Green Party candidate] Jill Stein, and we’re seeing that again as the 2020 election unfolds — there is intelligence that was released earlier in the year, that showed that once again Russia was supporting Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump in order to split apart the American electorate and pit us against each other, so that we couldn’t coalesce around a single, unifying candidate.”

Jankowicz, 33, has been in the spotlight this week, after her new role came to light, and her own record came into focus. She considers herself an authority on disinformation, but claimed in 2020 that the Hunter Biden laptop was a fake Russian story. She has also described criticism of Vice President Kamala Harris, and opposition to transgender ideology, as threats to U.S. national security. In 2019, she supported efforts to push Facebook to censor Breitbart News from the social media platform.

“Our democracy doesn’t work when we don’t have a shared understanding of truth,” Jankowicz told Milano on the podcast. She called for federal legislation increasing the regulation of political advertising on social media. She also applauded growing links between social media companies and “the CIA, the FBI, and Department of Homeland Security” to detect “foreign interference online.” She said that President Trump should have created “a disinformation czar at the level of the National Security Council, it’s going to be an interagency working group that’s going to pull in the smartest minds working on this all around our government, and we’re gonna help connect them with folks in Silicon Valley and civil society leaders.”

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.