Sheriff Clarke accuses CNN of 'electronic terrorism' — here's why

Milwaukee Sheriff David Clarke accused CNN's Andrew Kaczynski of "electronic terrorism" over his exposé of the popular Fox News figure's apparent plagiarism in his master's thesis.

Clarke claimed that he had been offered a position with the Department of Homeland Security, but later rescinded his acceptance to the position after the story was published. Homeland Security did not publicly confirm Clarke's claim.

Clarke spoke to Melanie Morgan of Media Equalizer about the accusations and his strategy to target Kaczynski personally.

"This guy's a hired gun," Clarke said. "That's why CNN brought him on. A character defamation specialist, if you would, to go after mainly people on the right, I don't know anybody on the left he's gone after."

"If you look at his background a little bit, he's not accomplished," he continued. "I mean the guy's a college dropout. You know it doesn't take much in the information age to quickly collect much information on people and then go about picking a nice subject to try to character assassinate a potential individual."

Clarke said that being accused of plagiarism was akin to being accused of child molestation.

"You know he uses fear and intimidation against his targets," Clarke said. "He did that with me. He's constantly sending you emails. To me, it's electronic terrorism."

“I realize what these guys are about," he said later in the interview. "It’s a ritual. It's really a ritual. It’s a game mainly played by the left. But the right is starting to understand this dynamic of how it's done. They use algorithms to collect information, and there's a counter-strategy for it."

"I am turning loose 105,000 activists," Morgan told Clarke, "and we are going to attach a copy of this article to every tweet and we are bombarding the CEO of Time Warner."

Clarke said that he approved of the strategy, adding that the Republican Party was too timid in its defense of such attacks and in staging counterattacks. He admitted that he had purposely tweeted about the story before it was published in order to force CNN's hand and publish early. He also said that he was counterpunching by mocking Kaczynski for dropping out of college.

Clarke had announced on a radio show that President Donald Trump offered him a position at Homeland Security and he was accepting it. He rescinded his acceptance of the offer after Kaczynski's story broke and the Naval Postgraduate School scrubbed his thesis from their website while they investigated the matter.