A former aide for Hillary Clinton tweeted the phone number to a bookstore after its owner reportedly called police when Steve Bannon was heckled.
Philippe Reines shared the number with his 45,000-plus followers after it was claimed the store's owners contacted officers over the weekend, when Mr Bannon became the target of a public confrontation.
Mr Reines defended himself in an email to the right-wing site Daily Caller, which he also later posted on Twitter, saying: "For convenience I copied & pasted the store’s ‘Contact Us’ page."
"Presumably they post their contact information on the world wide web in the hopes people contact them,” he continued, before referencing a moment in the 2016 presidential campaign when Donald Trump doxxed a Republican senator. "It’s not like I tweeted Lindsey Graham’s cell phone number," Mr Reines said.
Virginia's Black Swan Books became the scene of a tense exchange between the former White House chief strategist and a woman who called him a “piece of trash”, according to the bookstore’s owner, Nick Cooke.
In a statement posted to the store’s website, Mr Cooke said he called the police as the woman “repeatedly shouted obscenities” at the former Trump aide.
“Steve Bannon was simply standing, looking at books, minding his own business,” he later told the Times-Dispatch. ”I asked her to leave, and she wouldn’t. And I said, ‘I’m going to call the police if you don’t,’ and I went to call the police and she left.”
Mr Reines received backlash for posting the bookstore’s phone number on his social media. Several conservative pundits and other Twitter users accused him of inciting harassment against the store and its owners, despite the number already being publicly available.
“You posted the info to bombard this bookstore because you are upset they called the police,” one Twitter user wrote. ”Just own it - stop pretending your motive was just to provide information to people with no loaded intent.”
Mr Bannon joined a growing list of Trump aides past and present who have been confronted in public for working with the president.
White House aide Stephen Miller, Homeland Security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have all been recently heckled by protestors at restaurants who called for their resignations and shouted obscenities at them.
