Secretary of State Rex Tillerson on Wednesday dismissed as "erroneous" certain parts of an NBC News report that said his anger at President Donald Trump earlier this summer almost prompted him to resign and that Vice President Mike Pence intervened.

"The vice president has never had to persuade me to remain secretary of state because I have never considered leaving this post," Tillerson said in remarks at the State Department.

The story did not specify that Pence convinced Tillerson to stay, saying only that he counseled Tillerson on how to ease tensions with Trump. Other administration officials sought to keep Tillerson from quitting, according to the report.

Tillerson said the report was the work of "some who try to sow dissention" in Washington "by trying to tear others apart." He added, "I do not and will not operate that way."

The former Exxon Mobil executive declined to answer a shouted question after his prepared remarks regarding another element of the report – that he had called Trump a "moron" following a meeting at the Pentagon on July 20 involving members of the president's national security team and other officials from the Cabinet.

"I'm not going to deal with petty stuff like that," Tillerson said. "With the places I come from, we don't deal with that kind of petty nonsense. … I'm not going to be part of this effort to divide the administration."

Tillerson listed what he considers a string of foreign policy accomplishments from the Trump administration's first nine months in office, including creating "international unity around our peaceful pressure campaign" on North Korea, greater partnership in the Middle East over regional security concerns, NATO countries' contributing more to collective security, building relations between India and Pakistan on the war in Afghanistan, and defeating the Islamic State group's "fraudulent caliphate in Iraq and Syria."

"What we have accomplished, we have done as a team," Tillerson said. "There is much to be done and we're just getting started."

He said Trump "demands results wherever he goes and holds those around him accountable for whether they've done the job he's asked them to do."

"Accountability is one of the bedrock values the president and I share," Tillerson said.

He declined to say whether Trump had asked him to make the statement, though he said he had not spoken with the president since the report became public.

In a series of tweets on Wednesday Trump dismissed NBC "#FakeNews" and called on the news organization to retract the story.