Donald Trump railed against “criminal” leaks by the intelligence services on Wednesday as he attempted to shift the focus away from his former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who resigned after making misleading statements about conversations with the Russian ambassador, and the scandal over Russian influence enveloping the White House.

Speaking at a joint press conference with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump did not directly address Tuesday’s reports that staffers on his presidential campaign had been in frequent contact with Russian intelligence. Instead, relying on questions only from two friendly outlets, the US president railed against “the fake media” and implied that reports about his advisers’ ties to Russia were part of an attempt by the intelligence community “to cover up for the terrible loss” of Hillary Clinton in November.

“From intelligence, papers are being leaked, things are being leaked,” Trump said. “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, and 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 General Flynn, the way he was treated, and the documents and papers that were illegally, I stress that, illegally leaked. Very, very unfair,” he said.

Trump also insisted that Flynn was “a wonderful man” and said that he thought his former national security adviser “has been treated very, very unfairly by the media – as I call it, the fake media – in many cases”.

The White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, said on Tuesday that Trump’s trust in the retired general “had eroded [to the point] that it had to make a change”, following revelations that Flynn had made misleading statements to the administration about a conversation with the Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in December in which the two discussed US sanctions against Russia.

In a brief photo opportunity with Netanyahu in the Oval Office afterwards, Trump did not respond to shouted questions about his campaign’s communications with Russian officials. Trump also said he was unconcerned about whether an eventual deal included the creation of a Palestinian state or involved a single state, with the consent of both parties, in an apparent break with two decades of US commitment to closely shepherding a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Trump had previously addressed the controversy over any links to Russia on Twitter on Wednesday morning, writing: “This Russian connection non-sense is merely an attempt to cover-up the many mistakes made in Hillary Clinton’s losing campaign.”

He attacked the intelligence community for what he saw as “un-American” leaks to the newspapers that have written anonymously sourced stories about his and his advisers’ alleged ties with Russia in recent days. “Information is being illegally given to the failing @nytimes & @washingtonpost by the intelligence community (NSA and FBI?),” he wrote. “Just like Russia.” That was the “real scandal”, he said.

Trump also complained that the “fake news media is going crazy with their conspiracy theories and blind hatred”, echoing the language of the Kremlin reaction to the latest reports.





The reports by the New York Times and CNN about the Trump campaign aides’ communications with suspected Russian intelligence operatives make clear that there is currently no evidence that there was any collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives on the Kremlin’s efforts, as determined by US intelligence, to hack the election and wage an anti-Clinton influence campaign on Trump’s behalf.

When asked about the allegations by the New York Times, Paul Manafort, who was Trump’s campaign manager for much of 2016 and is the only adviser named by the NYT as having been in contact with Russian intelligence, said: “I have never knowingly spoken to Russian intelligence officers, and I have never been involved with anything to do with the Russian government or the Putin administration or any other issues under investigation today.”

He added: “It’s not like these people wear badges that say, ‘I’m a Russian intelligence officer.’”

Manafort, who had previously worked in Ukraine as an adviser to the former president Viktor Yanukovych, did not respond to a request for comment from the Guardian. He left the Trump campaign in August, after allegations about his activities in Ukraine first surfaced.

The controversy is drawing bipartisan scrutiny on Capitol Hill, where some Republicans are now calling for an independent investigation by a select committee or independent counsel. Three congressional investigations are already under way.

The Republican senator Lindsay Graham of South Carolina said in an interview on Wednesday morning: “If there were contacts between Russian officials and Trump campaign operatives that were inappropriate, then it would be time for the Congress to form a joint select commission to get to the bottom of all things Russia and Trump.”



He said it was time for Flynn to be “called forward” to testify in front of Congress. “If Trump told Flynn ‘get on the phone and tell the Russian ambassador that when I get into office we’re going to revisit sanctions’, that wouldn’t be a crime, that would be inappropriate because of the one president at a time policy. What would be not just inappropriate but could be a crime is if there was collaboration between the campaign and foreign intelligence services, that could be a crime.”

He added: “We know Flynn was talking to the Russians before they took over, before the inauguration, we now believe that Flynn was suggesting to the Russians that we would revisit sanctions issued by Obama. The question is if they were talking to the Russians during the transition period, were they talking to Russians during the campaign period?

“I think there is enough for us as Congress to ask that question and demand an answer and I hope the president would see that’s a fair thing to look at that.”

On Tuesday, the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, said widening the Senate intelligence committee’s investigation to cover contacts between Trump campaign officials and the Russian government would be “highly likely”.

Democrats have been far more heated in their criticism. They have called for an independent inquiry into Trump’s ties to Russia for weeks and have only grown more animated on the topic with the latest revelations. Hearings by the committees that have pledged to investigate Russian election interference have so far failed to materialize.

A particular measure of Democratic ire is directed at the FBI. Even as revelations over the Trump team’s contacts with Russia spill out into the press and topple a national security adviser, one Hill source noted with incredulity that the bureau refused to confirm or deny to Congress that any investigation into Trump and Russia existed.

The FBI director, James Comey, has taken that position both publicly and in private meetings with members of Congress. Many on the Democratic side have been incensed by what they perceive as an FBI double standard, as Comey repeatedly discussed the FBI’s inquiries into Clinton, in violation of justice department guidelines.

Comey in July had predicated that discussion, which he conceded was “unusual”, on the “intense public interest in the case”. Several Democrats expressed anger to Comey last month over his relative silence on Trump and Russia, another case, they argue, of intense public interest. Comey’s allies say the difference is that the Clinton investigation was completed, if not closed.

“I’d like the FBI to explain why they sent a letter about Clinton but not this,” Clinton’s former campaign manager, Robby Mook, said in a tweet on Tuesday night.

Her former spokesman, Brian Fallon, tweeted: “Everything we suspected during the campaign is proving true. This is a colossal scandal.”

The FBI would not comment for this story.