Rep. Xavier Becerra (D., Calif.) claimed Tuesday on Fox News that interim Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile never leaked debate questions to Hillary Clinton's campaign during the Democratic primary.
Brazile has come under fire after hacked emails released by WikiLeaks showed that she tipped off the Clinton campaign to questions that Clinton would be asked in primary debates. At the time Brazile was serving as vice chair of the DNC and was a paid CNN contributor when she reportedly fed the Clinton campaign debate questions ahead of time.
Becerra denied that Brazile ever passed along debate questions to the Clinton campaign in his interview with Fox News host Martha MacCallum. MacCallum preceded the interview by showing a clip from a tense exchange between Megyn Kelly and Brazile in which Kelly repeatedly asked Brazile if she had leaked the questions or not.
"What is going on here?" MacCallum asked after playing the clip.
"I don't think there is much of anything going on here," Becerra said. "CNN is reporting that it never shared questions for the debate with Donna Brazile or anyone else."
Becerra repeated the claim from CNN and Brazile that no questions were shared in advance with the Clinton campaign. While the emails themselves have not been independently verified, the questions in the emails were repeated nearly verbatim in the debates.
When MacCallum pushed Becerra on this point, he deflected and instead discussed how the U.S. intelligence community has blamed Russian-backed hackers for the leaked emails.
"They have been criminally hacking, essentially doing espionage on Americans to be able to influence this election," Becerra said. "They are then dispersing information, much of it which has never been corroborated, to try to influence the election."
Throughout the interview Becerra continued to say that Brazile never leaked the questions to the Clinton campaign.
"You don't know that there was never any communication or that she was not given those questions. You can say that you believe that is not the case but you don't know that for a fact," MacCallum said, interrupting Becerra's defense of Brazile.
"Donna Brazile says she never shared any type of questions," Becerra repeated. "So all of this is speculation."
The Clinton campaign has refused to verify any of the hacked emails, instead repeatedly claiming that the WikiLeaks releases of Clinton campaign chair Podesta's emails are a coordinated effort by the Russian government to influence the presidential election.