New Jersey Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Cory Booker ribbed a Breitbart reporter during a press conference, asking “What is this ‘Bart’ that is ‘bright?'” and professing not to have heard of the alt-right website.

Senator Booker fielded questions from reporters at the National Press Club on Wednesday, and also took one from conservative activist-turned-Breitbart reporter Penny Starr, who wanted to ask about President Donald Trump’s recent use of the word “lynching” to describe the constitutionally enshrined process of impeachment.

“Hi, I’m Penny Starr with the Breitbart News, back to the lynching question…” Starr began.

“What is this ‘Bart’ that is ‘bright?’ Booker interrupted, adding “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of it.”

“It’s named after a person, Andrew Breitbart,” Starr replied.

“Is there? Oh really? I didn’t know that. And who was Andrew?” Booker asked.

“He was probably the pioneer of citizen journalism,” Starr replied. Mr. Breitbart promoted deceptively edited videos featuring James O’Keefe in racist garb that were used to smear and destroy ACORN, a community organizing group. Following Breitbart’s death, the site became the “platform for the alt-right,” which the Associated Press describes as a “white nationalist movement.”

“Oh, that’s fantastic,” Booker said, and asked “And are you a citizen journalist, or do you get paid for your job?”

“I’m a journalist,” Starr replied.

“You’re a journalist,” Bookser said, and when Starr replied “yes,” he added “Okay.”

“Real quickly, back to the lynching question, since Trump tweeted, there’s been a lot of outrage expressed, there’s also been a lot of reporting on Democrats have used that term over and over when Bill Clinton was being impeached, and other times,” Starr said, and asked “Can you comment on that please?”

“Yeah, I don’t know if you know this, but there have been a lot of Democratic racists in the past,” Booker said, and added “And I’m not talking about people that have used that word in recent history, I’m going back to George Wallace and the like.”

“And if every time we call out Donald Trump for behavior, and the first response is ‘Look at the Democrat!’, that’s not going to solve the problem,” Booker continued. “He is the president of the United States of America. Words matter. And excusing him because some Democrat use the same word, we weren’t taught those morals on the playground, for crying out loud.”

Booker then spent a few more minutes excoriating Trump, and said that “One journalist said to me that their spouse was crying the other day because they are afraid to speak Spanish in public.”

He also revealed that he has read classified “intelligence reports about what the Russians are doing to undermine our republic,” and said “God, I wish I could have ripped a couple of pages out and brought them into the public, because one of their strategies, I saw in detail, is to make us hate each other, is to pour gasoline on the lines that divide us and hope they tear us apart.”

Booker concluded his answer by saying that “we have a president right now who is making those words more real and scary than they have ever been in my lifetime. Republicans and Democrats, we know better than this. And we can’t allow it or excuse it, or else we are complicit in that as well.”

Former Vice President Joe Biden is among the Democrats who used the term “lynching” to describe Clinton’s impeachment in the 90s, and apologized for that usage this week.

Watch the clip above, via Now This News.

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