Donald Trump strongly pushed back against the notion that Russia ever tried "to use leverage over me." | Getty Trump blasts intel agencies for 'leak': 'Are we living in Nazi Germany?' 'Russia has never tried to use leverage over me,' the president-elect tweets,

President-elect Donald Trump vehemently denied that Russia has compromising material on him or that he has any personal connection to the country, tweeting on Wednesday morning that "Russia has never tried to use leverage over me" and asking his followers "are we living in Nazi Germany?"

CNN reported Tuesday night that both Trump and President Barack Obama had been briefed on a summary of unverified intelligence suggesting that Russia had actively conspired with the president-elect’s campaign and also possessed salacious personal information about him. BuzzFeed later published what is believed to be the dossier containing that intelligence, cautioning that it is unverified and contains some errors.


Trump shot back in all caps on Twitter Tuesday night, characterizing the reports as “FAKE NEWS - A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT!” Wednesday morning, with his first press conference since July just hours away, Trump again took to his preferred social media platform to cite Russian government spokesman Dmitry Peskov, “Russia just said the unverified report paid for by political opponents is ‘A COMPLETE AND TOTAL FABRICATION, UTTER NONSENSE.’ Very unfair!”

“Russia has never tried to use leverage over me,” Trump wrote on Twitter in a subsequent Wednesday morning post, contesting the intelligence dossier’s specific allegations. “I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA - NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!”

"I win an election easily, a great 'movement' is verified, and crooked opponents try to belittle our victory with FAKE NEWS. A sorry state!" he wrote later in his flurry of posts. "Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to 'leak' into the public. One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?"

Trump’s Wednesday morning comments seemingly cited Peskov’s remarks Wednesday, in which he denied that Russia had collected compromising information on Trump or his 2016 opponent Hillary Clinton. He dismissed the reports from CNN, BuzzFeed and elsewhere as “complete fabrication and utter nonsense.”

“It is an obvious attempt to harm our bilateral relations,” Peskov said, adding “In English, it is called pulp fiction. Surely, we should react to it with the same sense of humor.”