Presidential Transition Trump seizes on ‘fake news’ to battle Russia claims 'It’s all fake news. It’s phony stuff. It didn’t happen,’ the president-elect said about the unverified allegations that Russia has compromising information about him.

President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday fought to deflate the first major controversy he’s confronted since his victory, flashing his characteristic defiance, hyperbole and humor as he beat back unsubstantiated claims that Russia has compromising personal information on him.

He admitted that he agreed with the intelligence community’s assessment that “it was Russia” that carried out the cyberattacks, but reserved his real enmity for U.S. entities — the political operatives who reportedly ordered up the findings, the intelligence officers who he believes leaked it and the news organizations that brought it to the public’s attention.


“Sick people, they put that crap together,” Trump said of the reports that emerged Tuesday night. “It should never have entered paper.”

Trump more forcefully sought to discredit the impact of these new revelations that threaten to undermine his credibility as the next commander in chief by brushing them off as “fake news” — seizing on one news organization’s controversial decision to publish 35 pages of unsubstantiated, classified intelligence to defuse another serious controversy.

At his first news conference since late July, Trump referred to “fake news” seven times in an hour, reappropriating the term coined to characterize the inflammatory, inaccurate claims presented under the guise of journalism that Trump often spoke of or tweeted about during his campaign.

He reserved particular scorn for BuzzFeed, which he called “a failing pile of garbage” after its publication Tuesday night of a dossier of raw, unverified intelligence that includes one particularly salacious allegation of Moscow hotel room activity. But he broadly condemned other outlets that disclosed the leaks from U.S. officials, including CNN and The New York Times, which reported that Trump and President Barack Obama had been presented with unsubstantiated evidence that the Kremlin had collected compromising personal and business information on the billionaire. The reports also included claims that Trump’s allies had directly colluded with Russian officials during the campaign.

“I think it’s a disgrace that information would be let out,” said Trump to more than 250 reporters jammed into Trump Tower’s marble lobby. “I saw the information. I read the information outside of that meeting. It’s all fake news. It’s phony stuff. It didn’t happen.”

Later Wednesday, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said he had spoken to Trump and expressed regret about the information leaks. “I expressed my profound dismay at the leaks that have been appearing in the press, and we both agreed that they are extremely corrosive and damaging to our national security,” Clapper said.

Trump also blasted CNN for its initial report that started Tuesday evening’s cascade of revelations — “going out of its way to build it up,” was how Trump put it — that seemingly prompted BuzzFeed and other outlets to publish their own reporting on the subject. After doing so, he refused to take a question from the network’s Jim Acosta. “I’m not going to give you a question,” Trump told Acosta. “You’re fake news.”

Trump’s angry defiance and ongoing feuds with Obama administration intelligence officials and the press, both of which have consequences beyond politics, work to excite his base and deflect attention from the unanswered questions surrounding his ability to confront Russia and other foreign adversaries and the continuing investigation into Russian cyberattacks that were allegedly conducted in an effort to boost his election chances.

The press, in particular, has long been a convenient foil for Trump, who insulated himself from damaging reports throughout the campaign by broad-brushing the media as biased and using friendly, conservative-leaning sites to push a counter-narrative.

In a notable turn on Wednesday, Trump took a question from Matt Boyle, a reporter for Breitbart, the website that often features headlines that are derogatory toward women, gays and minorities alongside consistently flattering coverage of the president-elect (its former executive chairman, Steve Bannon, was Trump’s campaign CEO and will serve as his senior White House adviser).

With 250 other reporters in the room, Boyle referenced “fake news and all the problems that we've seen throughout the media over the course of the election” before asking Trump to suggest “reforms” for “this industry here.”

Trump shrugged at the idea of specific reforms beyond recommending people “that have some moral compass.”

“You know, I've been hearing more and more about a thing called fake news and they're talking about people that go and say all sorts of things,” he continued. “But I will tell you, some of the media outlets that I deal with are fake news more so than anybody. I could name them, but I won't bother, but you have a few sitting right in front of us. So they're very, very dishonest people, but I think it's just something we're going to have to live with.”

Following Trump’s news conference, CNN issued an official statement in an effort to separate its reporting from BuzzFeed’s.

“CNN’s decision to publish carefully sourced reporting about the operations of our government is vastly different that BuzzFeed’s decision to publish unsubstantiated memos. The Trump team knows this,” the statement reads. “They are using BuzzFeed’s decision to deflect from CNN’s report, which has been matched by the other major news organizations. We are fully confident in our reporting.”

The reports on Tuesday night dramatically escalated Trump’s long-running dispute not only with the media but also with the intelligence community, and they further raised questions about Russian attempts to tilt the election in Trump’s favor.

Trump for months has chafed at intelligence assessments that Russia hacked into the Democratic National Committee and into the private email of John Podesta, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, saying he didn’t believe Russia was behind the cyberattacks.

He has repeatedly mocked the intelligence community on Twitter and criticized both officials and the media for leaks about the intelligence assessments.

On Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, he went on a tear. “FAKE NEWS - A TOTAL POLITICAL WITCH HUNT,” Trump tweeted late Tuesday.

He followed up Wednesday morning, saying in one of this tweets, “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?”

Russia also came to Trump’s defense on Wednesday. “This is a clear attempt to damage our bilateral relations,” Russian government spokesman Dmitry Peskov said. “Truly, there are those who whip up this hysteria, who will break their necks to support this ‘witch hunt.’”

At his news conference, Trump, who began by thanking the media that did not publish the unverified intelligence, speculated that the leaks could have come from the intelligence community itself and that it “would be a tremendous blot” on their record.

And he drew laughter when he obliquely referenced to the tawdriest allegation in the 35 pages of unverified raw intelligence.

“Does anyone really believe that story?” Trump asked. “I’m also very much of a germophobe, by the way, believe me.”

Intelligence officials, however, are still investigating the raw information that Trump spent much of his hourlong news conference trying to downplay.

And even though he acknowledged that he agrees with the intelligence community that “it was Russia” that carried out the hacks in question, Trump characterized foreign hacking as widespread and even portrayed as productive some of the information the hacks produced that he was able to weaponize against Hillary Clinton.

“Hacking’s bad, and it shouldn’t be done. But look at what was learned from that hacking: that Hillary got the questions from the [Democratic primary] debate and didn’t report it. That’s a horrible thing.”

He also continued to argue that his willingness to work with Putin, even after reports that the Russian leader ordered cyberattacks against the U.S., can benefit the country. “If Putin likes Donald Trump, guess what, folks, that’s called an asset, not a liability,” Trump said.

The president-elect ended his news conference by ignoring a pointed question about whether his associates had any contact with intermediaries representing the Russian government during the election, which the classified intelligence report that surfaced Tuesday states they did. But Trump reportedly responded that they did not when asked the question again as he headed toward the elevators after the news conference.

He promised a tough stance with Putin but was visibly more upset over the U.S. intelligence community’s leaking of the classified reports than the reported cyberattacks described therein.

“That’s something that Nazi Germany would have done,” Trump said of the leaks.

