Ron Nehring on Tuesday detailed suspect Twitter activity during the 2016 Republican primary whenever he said something negative about then-candidate Donald Trump.
The former spokesman for Sen. Ted Cruz's presidential campaign made the comments at a Heritage Foundation event titled, "Russian Information Warfare: An Advancing Front of Disinformation and Propaganda."
Nehring said he would appear on cable news on behalf of Cruz up to five times per day, and that he noticed a stark difference in his Twitter feed based on the criticism he gave.
"Whenever I had stepped off a television interview, if I had said something critical about Marco Rubio, or John Kasich, or Ben Carson, there was no response on Twitter whatsoever, dead," Nehring told the Heritage panel.
"However, if I was critical of Donald Trump, I would get a torrent of negative comments on Twitter. The tone was always extremely hysterical, not something that I would see from typical conservative activists," Nehring said.
Nehring then told the panel if he looked closely at the Twitter accounts, he noticed a pattern of there being no profile picture or no location listed.
"They are simply on the side of chaos. They will tell one thing to people on the left, and another thing to people on the right, both just to get everyone stoked up and to turn us against one another," Nehring said after the event, Roll Call reported.
"We saw this in 2016, we're seeing this now in 2017 with the NFL and any other divisive issue they find. That will continue because the Russian government is bent on creating as much chaos as possible in the West, mistrust of all institutions, to give them breathing room when it comes to their expansionist plans," Roll Call quoted Nehring.
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