McFaul tweeted a message to editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan that said RT had told a "lie" regarding his connection to activist Alexei Navalny.
"@M_Simonyan when we met at [the] White House you asked me [to] tell you when RT ran something untrue. On RT today, [it was stated that] @McFaul sent @Navalny to Yale. Lie," McFaul tweeted Tuesday evening.
Simonyan responded with a tweet saying she asked five employees of RT, also known as Russia Today, to watch all that day's programming and that they did not find the statement McFaul alleged having heard.
A search of the RT website uncovered an opinion article by political scientist Igor Panarin published Tuesday that contains the claim to which McFaul was referring in his tweet.
"As part of the program to initiate an 'orange coup' in Russia, McFaul sent Navalny to study at the Yale University as part of the Yale World Fellows program in 2010," Panarin wrote in a piece arguing that Saturday's pro-Putin rally represented a failure on the part of McFaul.
Panarin's article was explicitly stated to be an opinion piece on the site and contained a disclaimer saying the views expressed were Panarin's own.
McFaul has been the target of withering criticism from pro-Kremlin groups and commentators, who point to the U.S. ambassador's supposed expertise in "color revolutions" as evidence that he has been sent to Russia to instigate a popular uprising.
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