Paul Nehlen posts the phone numbers and email addresses of critics after claiming ‘74 are Jews’

A GOP challenger to U.S. Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) is giving out the contact information of his critics, singling them out for harassing calls and messages.

Paul Nehlen, who was beaten handily by Ryan in 2016 and is challenging him again this year, drew scathing attacks Tuesday by posting to Twitter a list of his critics and saying most of them are Jewish. Trying to capitalize on the attention, Nehlen also mixed in a sales pitch for merchandise from his campaign, which has paid out thousands of dollars in salary to his wife, according to federal election reports.

Critics called the posts anti-Semitic and several people pointed out that some of those whom Nehlen had identified as "Jews" were not Jewish.

Nehlen, in turn, has posted the phone numbers, email addresses and names of critics who reached out to his campaign to complain, in some cases harshly. The Nehlen campaign presented the critics' contacts, saying that "putting America first" means "not backing down to people like this."

Nehlen's bid for attention comes as his campaign paid out $13,000 for "staff payroll" and $685 in expense reimbursements to his wife, Gabriela Lira, between July and September 2017, Federal Election Commission filings show. Nehlen, who also serves as the treasurer of his own campaign, confirmed the payments but did not say if he's made more since then.

"God blessed me with a wife who is strong in her faith, supportive of my efforts to Make America First Again, so I’m thankful for the Republicans who came before me passing laws... to make a meager stipend for her campaign work possible," Nehlen said in an email.

The conservative website Media Trackers first reported on the payments.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reached out to some of the critics whose contact information was posted by Nehlen. One them, who would give her name only as "Megan," said she had received harassing calls and text messages as a result.

The woman said she is Jewish and said some of the messages she received included historical photos of the Holocaust. She said it wasn't right for a public figure to attack a private citizen who had contacted his campaign directly.

"I just don't like that he's posted my information," she said.

The woman said that she has called the Nehlen campaign back to ask that her contact information be removed but that it has not happened. Instead, Nehlen's campaign posted the text of those follow-up voice messages as well, once again including the woman's phone number.

The woman was reacting to a post by Nehlen in which he said that most of his critics on Twitter from the past month were Jewish.

"Of those 81 people, 74 are Jews, while only 7 are non-Jews," Nehlen wrote, adding a list of names to the tweet.

The list was quickly denounced as anti-Semitic by critics such as conservative commentator Ben Shapiro. Some of those on the list such as the journalist Yashar Ali also criticized it as inaccurate, saying they weren't Jewish.

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Some responded by creating #OtherPaulNehlenLists on Twitter.

On Wednesday, Nehlen defended his list in a message to the Journal Sentinel.

"I didn't single out people who are Jewish," Nehlen wrote. "I clearly posted a list of Jews and non-Jews to show the relative differences in the intensity of attacks from 2% of the population, who have attacked my America First positions in one month. The list is truthful."

Nehlen previously has drawn criticism for his anti-immigrant views and his use of the #ItsOkayToBeWhite hashtag on Twitter.

In December, Nehlen tweeted that he is reading "The Culture of Critique," a book about Jewish culture that's been widely criticized as anti-Semitic. Nehlen's comments reportedly led Breitbart to cut ties with him, despite the far-right website's positive coverage of his 2016 campaign to unseat Ryan.

Nehlen also won praise from President Donald Trump two years ago.

Shortly before Wisconsin's August 2016 primary, Trump said Nehlen was running “a very good campaign" against Ryan.

Despite that, Nehlen lost to Ryan by nearly 70 percentage points, getting just 16% of the vote to Ryan's 84%.

But that hasn't kept Nehlen from continuing to campaign and raise money that he then pays in part to his wife. In the first three quarters of 2017, Nehlen's campaign raised nearly $128,000, according to a filing with the Federal Election Commission.

Nehlen was trying to boost those numbers Tuesday, urging readers on Twitter to "swing over to the campaign store" to buy his T-shirts and bumper stickers.

Nehlen's FEC filing also lists $13,500 in "staff payroll" payments to Noel Fritsch, a North Carolina political consultant. A 2014 story in the Jackson, Miss., newspaper The Clarion Ledger quoted the attorney general's office there as saying that Fritsch had paid a man $2,000 to lie about vote buying in an election in that state.

A man answering Fritsch's number hung up on a reporter Wednesday.