CNN host Brianna Keilar called out Sebastian Gorka, a counterterrorism aide to President Donald Trump, for inaccurate claims about mass shootings.
On Sunday, Keilar confronted Gorka after he claimed there was an "ideological connection" between incidents with transgender mass shooters, including the recent tragedy at a Catholic church in Minnesota.
"You know, 96% of attackers, when you're looking at the U.S. Secret Service National Threat Assessment Center, looking at 172 mass attacks in the U.S. between 2016 and 2020, 96% were non-trans men," Keilar noted. "So I know you're focusing on this shooter being trans. The shooter was trans, and that is certainly of note. But are you missing the bigger picture here when you zero in on that instead of more broadly these school shooters as an epidemic, and you perhaps miss the through line that connects them all?"
Gorka insisted that Keilar should focus on "mass shootings at schools, specifically Christian or Catholic schools."
"So don't conflate different data sets just to make a political point," he remarked. "There was an ideological content to this attack. That's what terrorism is."
"By CNN's count, when you look at 32 school shootings since 2020, in which you have four or more people who have been killed," Keilar pointed out. "Only three of 32 of those shootings were committed by transgender shooters."
"Yeah, forgive me if I don't go with CNN stats, okay?" Gorka shot back. "CNN has proven itself to be wholly inaccurate in all kinds of things for the last 10 years, perpetrators of the Russia-Russia hoax, and that we didn't have an open border."
"It's simple math," Keilar responded.
"No, it's not!" Gorka bellowed. "It's distortions. No, you are distorting the facts."
"I'm going to stick with the facts and not CNN's pseudo facts," he insisted.
"We can't stick with your facts because they're not accurate," the CNN host replied. "In fact, in two of them, one of the ones you quoted, there's excuse me, in one of the ones that you've, in one of the ones that you posted, there was no evidence that he was trans."
"You have an agenda," Gorka asserted. "You just created live fake news. You just did it right in front of the small viewership you have."