During a hearing today before the House Oversight Committee, Teresa Fryer, the chief information security officer for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, told the committee that the Healthcare.gov website had passed all security tests and that she would recommend its continued authority to operate.

Note that this is the same person who testified before the committee last year and expressed serious reservations which committee chairman, and recidivist criminal, Darrell Issa, trumpeted in his attempt to derail ObamaCare. Today, however, he dismissed her validation of the website’s safety and continued to assert, without evidence, that security risks are present. At no time since the website launched has there been any security breach, user information theft or fraud, or any other unauthorized access.

So what does Fox News do upon hearing this testimony? They make a full-court press to double down on imaginary security problems. It is a deliberate effort to spread fear among the American people in order to frighten them away from using the website and learning about the availability of affordable and effective health insurance. The form of Fox’s anti-ObamaCare offensive came in the broadcast of a segment on America’s NewsHQ that alleged that Healthcare.gov is still unsecured.

Fox Anchor Bill Hemmer led the segment with a report that offered no support for the assertion that there were any security problems. The entire report consisted of unfounded allegations and speculation. That was followed by co-anchor Alisyn Camerota’s interview of Republican Rep. Jason Chaffetz who offered more of the same. When directly queried as to whether there was any verifiable evidence of risk, Chaffetz spun off into pure conjecture and factless rhetoric. No Democrat or ObamaCare supporter was given any airtime.

Reinforcing this faulty foundation, the Fox News website sought out the opinion of criminal hacker Kevin Mitnick. Fox identified Mitnick as “one of the world’s foremost cybersecurity experts,” despite the fact that his hacking occurred twenty years ago in a technology environment worlds removed from today’s. Furthermore, there is no indication in Fox’s report that Mitnick conducted any security assessments of Healthcare.gov. His entire opinion is based on documents from others who also don’t show any results from having tested the site’s security.

Nevertheless, Fox reported that “Mitnick submitted a scathing criticism to a House panel Thursday of ObamaCare’s Healthcare.gov website, calling the protections built into the site ‘shameful’ and ‘minimal.’ That assessment, however, was not backed up by one of Issa’s own witnesses before the congressional committee. Waylon Krush, CEO of Lunarline, told the panel that “There have been no confirmed security breaches or hacks of the site yet, […] The flaws that have been found are mere speculation.”

Fox News is demonstrating their determination to overshadow the real news of the day: that actual testing by responsible authorities has proven the site to be secure. So Fox throws up segments on the air and on the net that have no substance, but that attempt to refute the verifiable facts. And they do so with disreputable characters who have no first-hand knowledge of the subject on which they are commenting.

This isn’t the first time that Fox has recruited sketchy figures to advance their dishonest agenda. Late last year, Fox’s Gretchen Carlson interviewed John McAfee, the notorious developer of the eponymous anti-virus software, who is presently a fugitive from a murder investigation. During the interview, Carlson raised the specter of outlaw hackers laying in wait on the ObamaCare web site. However, neither she nor McAfee actually provide any evidence of such a threat.

So GOP partisans and ex-cons are Fox’s “experts” on website security. And they are summoned forth to give their dubious opinions on the same day that the chief CMS security officer certifies that Healthcare.gov has passed all security testing, which Fox doesn’t report at all. Is it any wonder how Fox viewers have become so painfully ignorant? And that’s just the way Roger Ailes, and the Republican Party, like them.