Prez takes on ‘#FakeNews’ in tweetstorm
Lashes out at unnamed sources
President Trump returned to form after his first trip abroad with a tweetstorm yesterday that signaled he’s going to take on scandalous headlines and allegations about his administration that went largely unanswered in his stead.
Trump dismissed as “#FakeNews” the anonymously sourced Washington Post and New York Times reports that his top adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner had suggested back-channel communications with Russia.
“It is my opinion that many of the leaks coming out of the White House are fabricated lies made up by the #FakeNews media,” Trump tweeted. “Whenever you see the words ‘sources say’ in the fake news media, and they don’t mention names ... it is very possible that those sources don’t exist but are made up by fake news writers.”
His latest tweets came amid reports Trump is weighing an overhaul of his White House staff, bringing back top campaign strategists and recruiting an expanded team of outside lawyers and PR pros.
Andrew Hemingway, who cochaired Trump’s campaign in New Hampshire, said Trump won’t have trouble countering anonymously sourced reports.
“I think he’s going to continue to hold the line that he has, which is that it’s fake news until somebody comes up with some evidence of some actual wrongdoing,” Hemingway said. “He just realizes that this is going to be a part of his presidency, and he’s going to allocate additional resources to make sure that it doesn’t derail him from the rest of the important work that he’s trying to do.”
U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (RS.C.), a frequent Trump critic, seemed to back him yesterday on CNN’s “State of the Union,” saying of the Kushner report, “I don’t trust this story as far as I can throw it.
“I think it makes no sense that the Russian ambassador would report back to Moscow on a channel that he most likely knows we’re monitoring,” Graham said. “The whole storyline is suspicious.”
Graham added it’s a “possibility” Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak, the source of comments about Kushner’s purported suggestion, lied on the monitored line to generate confusion.
In an apparent dig at the U.S. intelligence community, Trump also tweeted yesterday that British Prime Minister Theresa May was “very angry” about the leaking of information the U.K. gave to the U.S. about last Monday’s terrorist bombing outside an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester.