O’Rourke campaign defends ejection of Breitbart reporter

Beto O’Rourke’s presidential campaign removed a Breitbart News reporter from a campaign event in South Carolina on Tuesday, saying that while it believed in the right to a free press, it was drawing the line with the right-wing outlet.

“Beto for America believes in the right to a free press and works hard to ensure the campaign reflects that,” O’Rourke’s national press secretary, Aleigha Cavalier, said in a statement.

{mosads}“However, whether it’s dedicating an entire section of their website to ‘black crime,’ inferring that immigrants are terrorists, or using derogatory terms to refer to LGBTQ people, Breitbart News walks the line between being news and a perpetrator of hate speech,” she added.

Breitbart News reporter Joel Pollak wrote a story on Tuesday about being rejected from a campaign speech by O’Rourke in Columbia, S.C., on Tuesday.

He said he had covered O’Rourke’s events without incident previously and that he did not initially realize there was going to be an issue.

“A staff member in a Beto O’Rourke t-shirt approached this reporter and asked what outlet I represented,” Pollak wrote. “Upon reading the press credential on my chest, he put a hand on my shoulder and said, cheerfully, ‘Oh, hey. All right.'”

“A few minutes later, before the event began, a campus police officer approached this reporter and motioned for me to accompany him to the back of the room, adding that I should bring any property I had with me,” Pollak wrote. “In the hallway outside, he informed me that I was to leave.

“A different member of the O’Rourke campaign staff, who said his name was ‘Steven’ and would not give a last name, said that I was being ejected because I had been ‘disruptive’ at past events,” Pollak added.

Cavalier said Pollak was removed due to his previous reporting and because O’Rourke was going to be talking about race at Benedict College, a historically black institution. 

“Given this particular Breitbart employee’s previous hateful reporting and the sensitivity of the topics being discussed with students at an HBCU, a campaign staffer made the call to ask him to leave to ensure that the students attending the event felt comfortable and safe while sharing their experiences as young people of color,” Cavalier said.