Diamond and Silk, the Trump-loving video-blogging sisters the president hailed as “warriors” on Thursday, later testified under oath that they had never been paid by the Trump campaign — although records show otherwise.
“We have never been paid by the Trump campaign,” Lynette Hardaway, who goes by Diamond, said in response to Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas.
But Federal Election Commission records show that the Trump campaign paid them more than $1,275 for consulting work in 2016.
The hearing before the House Judiciary Committee about their claims that they had been censored by Facebook over their pro-Trump views quickly turned into a partisan slugfest, Politico reported.
Diamond and Silk, whose real name is Rochelle Richardson, have a beef with the social media giant that began last fall.
Facebook changed its terms of service for pages that were monetized without first notifying the pair.
Facebook then repeatedly offered to give them back their platform, but the duo have still insisted that they’d been banned.
Trump said on “Fox & Friends” before the hearing that the pair were “amazing “and “beautiful, wonderful women.”
Republicans invited them to appear before the committee for a hearing on tech companies’ content policies.
Diamond and Silk said at the hearing that they had seen many examples of Facebook censoring conservatives, such as Sarah Palin and Trump, and that friends have told them they’ve had trouble finding their page on Facebook, the website reported, though a quick search Thursday produced their page within seconds.
“It’s not fair for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg to dictate to people and tell them what they can and cannot see in their news feed,” Hardaway said. “I thought this was a platform for all ideas.”
Democrats including Reps. Jim Himes of Connecticut and Jerry Nadler of New York derided their GOP counterparts, arguing that the hearing was a lame pretext to publicize a debunked narrative that Facebook singled out Diamond and Silk for censorship.
“House Republicans have no time for substantive oversight of the Trump administration, or election security, or privacy policy, or even a discussion about the wisdom of regulating social media platforms — but they have made time for Diamond and Silk,” Nadler said.
“They have prioritized this spectacle over every other conversation we could be having today.”
GOP Tennessee Rep. Marsha Blackburn countered that social media companies target conservative content for removal.
“I had the ability to fight back. Diamond and Silk had the ability to fight back. But what about the thousands of others being thrown out of our new public squares for no good reason?” she said.