BuzzFeed says it harbors no bias against President Trump despite one of its employees wishing for his assassination.

In a conversation among three BuzzFeed employees in a leaked workplace chat, one of them, Maycie Thornton, the site’s director of social media, says, “Maybe someone will assassinate him.” Then both Nick Guillory and Kari Koeppel laughed and seemed to have wished for something similar.

Former BuzzFeed employee Tim “Treadstone” Gionet, who also goes by Baked Alaska, provided screenshots of the private chat to Big League Politics:

Gionet, who says he faced discrimination as a conservative Trump supporter while he worked there, added, “This was not the first time BuzzFeed employees talked openly about wishing President Trump would get assassinated, they hated conservatives so much they even held an office party when Justice Scalia died. It was a toxic environment and you were declared a heretic if you were a Trump supporter, bottom line.”

Indeed, BuzzFeed has never hid its disdain for Trump or Republicans in its coverage. Yet, according to a statement released by spokesman Matt Mittenhal, they don’t feel any liberal bias is present at the organization:

While the remark in question is regrettable, it was made in private by someone who is not a reporter nor even an employee of BuzzFeed News. Attempting to turn a throwaway comment from an entertainment employee into evidence of bias at an affiliated news division is ludicrous.

To be clear, Thornton is an employee of BuzzFeed, but not in the news division. That’s how Mittenhal attempts to claim there is no affiliation.

When reports of this conversation went live, all three employees involved set their social media accounts to private. 

Ben Smith, editor-in-chief at the site and often referred to as BuzzFeed Ben, defended the claim that his organization is biased on Tucker Carlson's show. He also denied the former conservative employee was ever mistreated: