Matthew Dowd Gets Snippy with Brianna Keilar, Dismisses Deleted Tweets as Fox ‘Conspiracy’: ‘I Answered Three Times’

Tensions briefly flared between CNN’s Brianna Keilar and Matthew Dowd as the former George W. Bush strategist fielded questions about a major Twitter purge he did.

Dowd joined Keilar on Monday for New Day in order to discuss his campaign to be lieutenant governor of Texas. At one point, Keilar noted that Fox News recently reported that Dowd deleted approximately 175,000 tweets of his before announcing his candidacy.

When asked about this, Dowd said it was “funny” because Fox “looks for anything to come up with some conspiracy theory as they do.”

“I decided to go through and delete all my old tweets, whatever it happened to be,” he continued. “There’s no conspiracy thing here. It’s just cleaning up my files long before I thought about running in this race. But, again, it’s a typical Fox thing to turn to some conspiracy thinking it has more meaning than it actually does.”

Keilar asked Dowd why did he do it, and as Dowd reiterated that he was trying to clean house, she countered that “this isn’t like emptying your email inbox.” Dowd continued to dismiss concerns by saying that his history is already on public record, but Keilar asked once more “Why delete them?”

“You know that is going to raise eyebrows,” Keilar said. “It’s going to elicit scrutiny. In the age of when anyone deletes anything or isn’t forthcoming with, say, emails, we know where this goes. You know it is going to grab attention.”

His response:

So what I think is happening, Brianna, and I think it’s unfortunate, is Fox News does this, which is dream of some conspiracy theory, as they always do, which obviously has nothing to do with anything of what we’re talking about. And then people again to repeat it. Again, I cleaned up my inbox in May or June, just deleted all of old tweets. I think I have 5,000 sitting there. I just think we shouldn’t play into Fox News’ sort of conspiracy theories.

Keilar concluded by defending her line of inquiry as “an important question to ask.”

“Well you asked it, and I answered it,” Dowd snapped back. “You asked it, and I answered it three times.”

Watch above, via CNN.