Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and Alex Jones clashed Wednesday outside a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, with Rubio threatening to take care of Jones after the Infowars host touched his shoulder.
When Jones reached out to touch Rubio’s shoulder, the senator glared at Jones, warning him not to touch him again in front of a gaggle of reporters with cameras and notebooks.
“You’re not gonna get arrested man,” Rubio said after Jones said he had only “patted [him] nicely.”
“I’ll handle it myself,” Rubio said.
Jones then accused Rubio of threatening to beat him up.
{mosads}“Marco Rubio just threatened to beat me up,” Jones told a camera trailing him around on Capitol Hill.
“I didn’t say that,” Rubio said.
“Oh, he’ll beat me up,” Jones said mockingly. “Oh he’s so mad. You’re not going to silence me. You’re not going to silence America.”
Jones, who previously mocked Rubio’s chuckle and called him a frat boy, then offered another insult as Rubio aides watched him intently.
“You are literally like a little gangster thug,” Jones said.
Jones repeatedly interrupted Rubio as he sought to answer questions about the hearing, where Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg were testifying.
The two leaders were asked questions about what their platforms were doing to prevent foreign interference in U.S. elections, but were also expected to be grilled about perceived biases against conservatives on their sites.
Jones was at the hearing to draw attention to his site being banned from social media networks.
At times, Rubio sought to laugh off Jones’s antics, smiling and laughing at him before Jones touched his shoulder.
Rubio repeatedly suggested he had no idea who Jones was, something that seemed unlikely given the attention given to Jones and Infowars in the weeks ahead of the hearing.
“I don’t know who you are man,” Rubio said at one point to the conspiracy theorist, who has falsely stated that the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting was a hoax.
That led Jones to boast about his site’s visitors and followers.
“Infowars.com is bigger than ever,” Jones said.
As Rubio left the reporters, he invited them to hang around and “talk to this clown,” referring to Jones.
“Huh, huh, huh, huh. Look at this little frat boy. So cool,” Jones said as Rubio walked off.
Jones then used a gay slur toward Rubio.
“Go back to the bathhouse. Compromise in the bathhouses. There goes Rubio. Little punk,” Jones said.
Rubio later criticized reporters for giving any attention to the likes of Jones.
“You guys give these guys way too much attention. We’re making crazy people superstars, and so you’re going to get crazier people,” he said.
Rubio said he knows Jones by name, but didn’t recognize him.
“I see some scrubby guy walk up to me, step to me, acting all crazy. I didn’t know who he was. I know the name, I know all the crazy stuff, I just don’t know what he looks like,” he said.
Asked if he at all feared for his safety when Jones touched him, Rubio said, “He touched me and I just asked him not to do it.”
“I just asked him not to touch me. He didn’t do it again,” he noted.
Molly K. Hooper and Alexander Bolton contributed.