Sen. Doug Jones is up for reelection in 2020 and will be a top GOP target. | Win McNamee/Getty Images Elections Doug Jones wants federal probe into disinformation tactics in his race

Alabama Sen. Doug Jones is calling for a federal investigation into online tactics used in his Senate race last year that mimicked Russian election meddling, the Democrat said in an interview on Thursday.

Jonathon Morgan, who heads the research company New Knowledge, told the New York Times and the Washington Post this week that he experimented with social media posts containing disinformation to test the effectiveness of strategies used by Russian election meddlers. But Jones said that his 2017 Senate race should not be a laboratory for using such techniques and said he wanted a thorough probe of whether the law was broken.


Even though the effort was minor and was not used against him, Jones said he is “outraged” and that congressional hearings wouldn’t be enough: “It needs to not just be a congressional inquiry. People get called in front of Congress all the damn time. There needs to be a look to see if there were any laws that were broke.”

“What is obvious now is that we have focused so much on Russia that we haven’t focused on the fact that people in this country could take the same playbook and do the same damn thing,” Jones said. “I’d like to see the FEC and the Justice Department look at this and see if any laws are being violated or were violated. And if there were, do it. Go after them.”

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New Knowledge wrote one of the reports given to the Senate Intelligence Committee this week that offered a detailed look at the scope of Russian election interference into the 2016 presidential election. Morgan’s own experiment was far more modest, according to the Times, and seemed aimed at dividing supporters of GOP candidate Roy Moore, who was plagued by allegations of sexual assault and lost to Jones.

Jones said he was under assault by thousands of bots during the campaign but didn’t realize that Morgan was using his race as a testing ground for Russian disinformation tactics, albeit on a smaller scale. Jones is up for reelection in 2020 and will be a top GOP target.

“I’m concerned it’s going to happen again to me, to my opponent, to my colleagues up here, to the people in the House, to the president, to the people who are going to run against the president. This should not happen to anyone in this country. We have got to take steps to protect our electoral system,” Jones said.