C-SPAN Suddenly Switches to Russian Network

C-SPAN says it's looking into a weird incident Thursday afternoon, when live coverage of Congress was replaced by the Kremlin-funded news channel Russia Today. The bizarre switcheroo happened around 2:30pm when Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters was speaking about the SEC and had mentioned Donald Trump and Russia repeatedly, Politico reports. In video of the switch, Waters is abruptly replaced by a live RT feed for about 10 minutes. C-SPAN says that since RT is one of the networks that it monitors, they believe this was nothing more sinister than "an internal routing issue."

In a statement, C-SPAN said it does not believe it was hacked, but that it takes "network security very seriously and will continue with a deeper investigation, which may take some time." Waters tells the New York Times that she finds the incident very strange. "At a time when our intelligence agencies are very confident and basically have confirmed that Russia hacked the DNC and other political interests, and then we have, while I'm on the floor of the House, talking about Trump and Russia, I get interfered with and interrupted by Russia Today," she says. (In September, Trump was criticized for speaking to RT about the election.)