A view of President Donald Trump's inauguration from the National Mall at 11:36 a.m., around the time Trump was sworn into office. | M. Scott Mahaskey/POLITICO Priebus charges media out to 'de-legitimize' Trump, vows to fight back

White House chief of staff Reince Priebus on Sunday accused the media of trying to "de-legitimize" President Donald Trump by reporting smaller crowd sizes for his inauguration — and vowed to fight back.

In an interview on "Fox News Sunday," Priebus pointed to reports on the crowd sizes, which appeared considerably smaller than President Barack Obama's 2009 inauguration based on photographs, and to an erroneous tweet by a reporter, which was corrected, that a bust of Martin Luther King Jr. had been removed from the Oval Office.


Priebus vowed the new Trump White House would continue to call out what it believed were issues with "honesty in the media."

"The point is not the crowd size," Priebus said. "The point is the attacks and the attempt to de-legitimize this president in one day, and we're not going to sit around and take it."

"I'm saying there's an obsession by the media to de-legitimize this president and we are not going to sit around let it happen," Priebus added. "We are going to fight back tooth and nail every day and twice on Sunday."

White House press secretary Sean Spicer blasted media reports on the size of the inaugural crowds in a statement from the White House briefing room Saturday evening. Without taking questions, he said that "no one had numbers" on official attendance and Trump's swearing-in "was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period."

Earlier Saturday, Trump also bragged of the crowd sizes and emphasized that he has "a running war with the media" in an address to CIA employees.