The special counsel’s office broke its silence to dispute a claim by Buzzfeed that Trump had ordered his fixer to lie to Congress

Donald Trump’s battle with the media intensified on Saturday after the special counsel investigating Russian interference in the US election issued an unprecedented public statement that disputed an incriminating report.

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The president thanked Robert Mueller and attacked both BuzzFeed, which published the story, and what he called “disgraceful” coverage of it.

Mueller’s office, notoriously silent and leak-proof, intervened after BuzzFeed reported that Trump directed his lawyer and fixer Michael Cohen to lie to Congress about a property deal in Moscow.

The article, citing two unidentified sources, said Mueller’s investigators learned about Trump’s instruction “through interviews with multiple witnesses from the Trump Organization and internal company emails, text messages, and a cache of other documents”.

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The allegation was one of the gravest yet against the president. Some congressional Democrats suggested that “if true”, it would constitute a federal crime and potential grounds for impeachment.

But late on Friday the special counsel spokesman, Peter Carr, released a rare statement that said: “BuzzFeed’s description of specific statements to the special counsel’s office, and characterization of documents and testimony obtained by this office, regarding Michael Cohen’s congressional testimony are not accurate.”

A very sad day for journalism, but a great day for our Country! Donald Trump

The special counsel has never before issued such a substantive rebuke to media coverage. The Washington Post reported: “Inside the justice department, the statement was viewed as a huge step, and one that would have been taken only if the special counsel’s office viewed the story as almost entirely incorrect.”

Trump and his allies, who have derided Mueller’s investigation as a “witch-hunt”, sought to weaponise the dispute to build their narrative of media bias, noting that BuzzFeed’s account had been discussed on cable news channels all day. The president, who denies collusion with Russia, tweeted: “A very sad day for journalism, but a great day for our Country!”

On Saturday he told reporters at the White House he appreciated “the special counsel coming out with a statement last night” and added: “I think that the Buzzfeed piece was a disgrace to our country. It was a disgrace to journalism, and I think also that the coverage by the mainstream media was disgraceful, and I think it’s going to take a long time for the mainstream media to recover its credibility.”

He also tweeted on the matter, saying he had been mistreated by media “over the past 3 years (including the election lead-up)”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Donald Trump called the Buzzfeed story disgraceful. Photograph: Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA

BuzzFeed defended its story. Ben Smith, its editor-in-chief, said: “We stand by the reporting and the sources who informed it, and we urge the special counsel to make clear what he’s disputing.”

BuzzFeed ignited a political firestorm in January 2017 when it published a dossier compiled by the former MI6 officer Christopher Steele about the Trump election campaign and its links with Moscow.

But other US media outlets raised questions over its Cohen report. Ronan Farrow, an investigative journalist at the New Yorker magazine, tweeted: “I can’t speak to Buzzfeed’s sourcing, but, for what it’s worth, I declined to run with parts of the narrative they conveyed based on a source central to the story repeatedly disputing the idea that Trump directly issued orders of that kind.”

The turn of events triggered a debate about the media’s thin margin of error in the Trump era. Trump’s lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, gleefully tweeted: “I ask the press to take heed that their hysterical desire to destroy this President has gone too far. They pursued this without critical analysis all day. #FAKENEWS.”

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John Podhoretz, a columnist at the New York Post newspaper, posted: “The people who should be angriest about the BuzzFeed story are the mainstream media pursuing the Mueller story who now have a harder job when it comes to convincing Russia skeptics that they are not simply out to get Trump by any means necessary.”

Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent of the New York Times, posed an intriguing question: “If this is the first story the special counsel has felt compelled to dispute, does that mean he had no objection to all the others that have come out before now?”

Cohen, who once said he was so loyal to Trump that he would “take a bullet” for him, is scheduled to begin a three-year prison sentence in March after pleading guilty to charges including campaign finance violations, tax evasion and lying to Congress.

Cohen is also due to testify before the House oversight committee on Capitol Hill on 7 February. It is now quite possible the first question he will be asked is whether Trump told him to lie to Congress.