Trump to Senate panel: Investigate media

WASHINGTON » President Donald Trump suggested Thursday that the Senate Intelligence Committee investigate media companies that he believes are reporting information that is “just made up.”

“Why Isn’t the Senate Intel Committee looking into the Fake News Networks in OUR country to see why so much of our news is just made up-FAKE!” the president tweeted from his personal account early Thursday.

The president’s tweet comes one day after leaders of the committee announced that their findings confirm the conclusions of the U.S. intelligence community that Russia tried to interfere in the 2016 presidential election.

They also warned that Russian operatives may try to continue to interfere in future elections, including the midterms next year and the 2020 presidential election.

The committee leaders Sens. Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Mark Warner, D-Va. said they have reached no conclusion on whether Trump’s campaign was colluding with the Russians. That investigation will continue.

On Thursday, Burr said the committee is “not going to investigate news organizations,” but that some of the committee’s findings during the Russia probe contradict some media reports.

“We will use the findings of our report to let the American people hold every news organization accountable for what they portrayed as fact, in many cases without sources - at least, no sources that would admit to it,” Burr told Politico. “And I think, when we finish our report, we will find that quite a few news organizations ran stories that were not factual.”

At a news briefing Thursday afternoon, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders wouldn’t directly say if the president actually wants a congressional investigation of the media - but she did say that “the president has a great frustration with the fact that a lot of the times you have inaccurate information that’s being presented as factual.”