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Reuters

Review the Post’s live coverage of Trump’s press conference

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NEW YORK — Defiant and unyielding, President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday adamantly denied reports that Russia had obtained compromising personal and financial information about him, calling it a “tremendous blot” on the record of the intelligence community if it had released such material.

The incoming president, in his first news conference since late July, firmly pushed back on the media reports and chided news organizations for publishing the material late Tuesday night. His extraordinary defence, coming just nine days before Trump’s inauguration, dominated a highly anticipated press conference in which the future president also announced a new Cabinet member and his plans to disentangle himself from his sprawling global business empire.

“I think it’s a disgrace that information would be let out. I saw the information, I read the information outside of that meeting,” he said, a reference to a classified briefing he received from intelligence leaders. “It’s all fake news, it’s phoney stuff, it didn’t happen,” Trump said. “It was gotten by opponents of ours.”

Asked about whether he accepted that Russian President Vladimir Putin tried to help him win the presidential election, Trump called it “an asset, not a liability” and an improvement over what he called America’s current “horrible relationship with Russia.”