Dorsey Hearing Protester Drowned Out by Auctioneer Lawmaker

(Bloomberg) -- A protester disrupted Jack Dorsey’s testimony before the House Energy and Commerce Committee, berating the Twitter Inc. chief executive officer and calling him a liar. She asked President Donald Trump to help her and said Dorsey is trying to influence the election.

“We are not Russian bots, we are conservatives,” she said.

It seems the woman was Laura Loomer, a right wing gadfly with a social media following among some conservatives. She’s worked with Project Veritas, the outfit that used trickery to try to portray Twitter employees as biased against conservatives. She has disrupted Shakespeare in the Park and was banned from using Uber or Lyft for outbursts against Muslim drivers.

The interruption was brief, as Loomer’s rant was quickly drowned out by U.S. Representative Billy Long, a Missouri Republican with rapid-fire auctioneer skills.

Long’s House biography says: “For over 30 years, Congressman Long was a real estate broker and owner of Billy Long Auctions LLC in Springfield.”

For more coverage of Dorsey’s testimony, see the TOPLive blog on the Bloomberg terminal.

--With assistance from Ben Brody.

To contact the reporters on this story: Gerrit De Vynck in New York at gdevynck@bloomberg.net;Selina Wang in San Francisco at swang533@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Anny Kuo at akuo1@bloomberg.net, Andrew Dunn

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