In the wake of reports by CNN and Buzzfeed on his campaign’s ties to Russia, Donald Trump took to Twitter to denounce the media.

“Fake news - a total political witch hunt!” Mr. Trump tweeted in screaming all-capital letters.

While that tweet, posted at 8:19 p.m. did not specify the proximate cause of his ire, a later tweet did.

“BuzzFeed Runs Unverifiable Trump-Russia Claims #FakeNews,” he tweeted at 9:00 p.m.



Earlier in the evening, CNN reported that U.S. intelligence had briefed the president-elect on reports that Russia had compromising information on him. Buzzfeed also posted a 35-page dossier containing salacious but unverified characterizations of what the Kremlin supposedly has on Mr. Trump.

To back up his claim on at least one significant point, Mr. Trump re-tweeted a post by Michael Cohen, his special counsel and Trump Organization executive vice president. The raw-intelligence dossier claimed Mr. Cohen had met with Kremlin surrogates in Prague during the campaign to coordinate strategy, a bombshell claim if true.

“I have never been to Prague in my life,” Mr. Cohen tweeted, along with a photo of his passport.

He also backed Mr. Trump by using the hashtag “#fakenews.”

In an interview with Mic webzine, Mr. Cohen laughed off the charges as “so ridiculous on so many levels.”

“Somebody is having a lot of fun at your expense,” he said. “Clearly the person who created this did so from their imagination or did so hoping that the liberal media would run with this fake story for whatever rationale they might have.”

Incoming White House spokesman Sean Spicer also blasted Buzzfeed for publishing raw-intelligence dossiers, documents that sometimes do little more than repeat gossip.

“@BuzzFeed itself admits ‘as we noted in our story there is serious reason to doubt the allegations’. Just pathetic,” he tweeted.

President Vladimir Putin’s spokesman said the reports are a “complete fabrication and utter nonsense” and the Kremlin “does not engage in collecting compromising material,” The Associated Press reported.



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