PHILADELPHIA — Doug Mastriano, the Republican nominee for governor, is sounding the “fake news” alarm over a Monday Inquirer article about his disappearing Facebook videos, claiming that they were removed due to a “default Facebook setting” that automatically deleted the videos after 30 days.
His campaign did not address why the most recent video cited in the story — recorded in late June — had already disappeared within about a week, or why many videos that are older than 30 days have not been deleted.
Jenna Ellis, a Mastriano legal adviser and former attorney for Donald Trump who was involved in his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, on Monday tweeted a statement attributed to an unnamed spokesman for the Mastriano campaign.
“The biased mainstream media is trying to manufacture a scandal, but they haven’t done their homework,” the statement said.
The Mastriano campaign did not respond to a request for comment prior to publication of Monday’s Inquirer story. Nor did it respond to the New York Times when it later asked similar questions about why some videos remained and others vanished.
The Inquirer reported on Monday that at least 14 videos have disappeared from the Mastriano campaign Facebook page in the last three months. In them, he claims that global warming is based on “pop science,” theorizes that Republicans who don’t support him secretly “disdain veterans,” and reiterates his position that “life starts at conception.”
In the past, Mastriano has deleted tweets promoting the Qanon conspiracy theory, and other potentially problematic content. His Senate website has also been scrubbed of a plan he proposed early in the COVID-19 pandemic to lift medical privacy restrictions so the government could disclose the names and locations of people infected.
Since Monday’s article published, Mastriano has been criticized by Josh Shapiro, the Democratic nominee for governor, and other Democrats who accused him of trying to moderate his positions for the general election after prevailing in a cutthroat Republican primary in May.
“Doug Mastriano spends every day trafficking conspiracy theories and reminding voters his top priority is banning abortion with no exceptions,” Manuel Bonder, a campaign spokesman for Shapiro, told the New York Times. “No amount of clicking the delete button can change the fact that Mastriano is the most extreme, dangerous candidate in Pennsylvania history.”
The Mastriano campaign did not respond Tuesday to a request for comment.
