Trump threatens ‘low-life leakers’ will be caught The president also calls on the New York Times and other media organizations to apologize for publishing disclosures.

President Donald Trump continued his rhetorical assault against the government leaks that have already proved damaging to his weeks-old administration, putting on notice both “low-life leakers” and the media with which they interact.

“Leaking, and even illegal classified leaking, has been a big problem in Washington for years. Failing @nytimes (and others) must apologize!” Trump wrote on Twitter on Thursday morning, adding in a second post that “the spotlight has finally been put on the low-life leakers! They will be caught!”


He also took a swipe at Democrats during his rant, writing, "FAKE NEWS media, which makes up stories and 'sources,' is far more effective than the discredited Democrats - but they are fading fast!"

"The Democrats had to come up with a story as to why they lost the election, and so badly (306), so they made up a story - RUSSIA. Fake news!" the president tweeted later Thursday morning, referring to reports of ties to Russia that have hounded him for months.

Trump's Thursday morning tweet storm presented puzzling logic, the president at once complaining about government officials acting as sources by leaking information for media reports, then decrying those same reports as "fake news" based on made-up sources. The president also misstated the number of electoral votes he received, writing that he won the White House with 306 of them. While Trump earned 306 electoral votes on Election Day, he wound up with 304 after two electors in Texas refused to cast their ballots for Trump.

It is the second consecutive day that Trump has been critical of leakers, a tirade that followed the resignation of national security adviser Michael Flynn earlier this week. Perhaps seeking an avenue with which to go on the offensive amid the swirling controversy, Trump has kept his attacks focused on the means by which reporters have sourced stories harmful to his administration, not the substance of the stories themselves. He has especially aimed his bombast at the intelligence community, escalating his long-running feud by accusing its officials of delivering leaks to reporters.

Flynn, a longtime ally of Trump’s and the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, admitted in his resignation letter that he had misled Vice President Mike Pence and others about the nature of a telephone conversation he had with the Russian ambassador to the U.S. Flynn had denied discussing easing U.S. sanctions with the Russian ambassador, and it wasn’t until excerpts of that conversation were published by The Washington Post that Flynn was forced to back away from that denial.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said Trump ultimately asked Flynn for his resignation because the national security adviser no longer had the trust of the president. But when Trump was asked about Flynn during a news conference on Wednesday, the president blamed the media for his ouster and said Flynn “is a wonderful man” who was “treated very, very unfairly.”

“From intelligence, papers are being leaked, things are being leaked. It's criminal action, criminal act, and it's been going on for a long time before me, but now it's really going on,” Trump said at the news conference. “People are trying to cover up for a terrible loss that the Democrats had under Hillary Clinton. I think it's very, very unfair what's happened to Gen. Flynn, the way he was treated, and the documents and papers that were illegally — I stress that — illegally leaked. Very, very unfair.”

Further complicating the White House’s explanation of Flynn’s resignation is a timeline of events that shows some in the administration were briefed weeks ago by then-acting Attorney General Sally Yates on the truth of the national security adviser’s phone call with the Russian ambassador. Neither Spicer nor counselor to the president Kellyanne Conway were able to offer clear explanations of why Flynn was kept on for weeks after the White House learned of his misstatements, except to say that the situation was fluid and that Trump is an exceptionally loyal person.

Both before and since taking office, Trump has regularly blamed leaks on the intelligence community, once likening it to “Nazi Germany” following the publication of a dossier containing unverified but scandalous allegations. On Wednesday, with reports once again swirling about ties between top Trump allies and the Kremlin, the president compared the intelligence community to Russia.

That rift between Trump and the nation’s intelligence apparatus has led to reports, including one in the Wall Street Journal, that some in the intelligence community have withheld information from the president over concerns that it might be leaked or otherwise compromised by an administration that has been in near-constant turmoil since it arrived in the White House.

Late Wednesday, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence released a statement denying that anyone in the intelligence community had kept any information from the president.

"Any suggestion that the U.S. Intelligence Community is withholding information and not providing the best possible intelligence to the President and his national security team is not true,” the ODNI statement said.

While Trump has made plugging leaks, or at least complaining about them publicly, his mission as of late, the president has not always been averse to such practices. During the presidential campaign, Trump regularly and enthusiastically drew on hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and other high-level members of the party to attack his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

And at a news conference last July, Trump encouraged Russian hackers to search for emails deleted from the private email server that Clinton maintained during her tenure as secretary of state.