Trump Spokesman: Unverified Intelligence Claims 'Pathetic Attempt To Get Clicks'
NEW YORK (CBS/AP) -- A spokesman for President-elect Donald Trump slammed news reports over a Russian intelligence report that was released Tuesday night.
Sean Spicer, the incoming White House press secretary, called it "highly irresponsible" for BuzzFeed to publish the report that included sordid sexual accusations.
"It's frankly outrageous and highly irresponsible for a left-wing blog that was openly hostile to the president-elect campaign, to drop highly salacious and flat-out false information on the internet just days before [Trump] takes the oath of office," Spicer said.
BuzzFeed published a two-page dossier on Tuesday night about the unverified intelligence claims.
"For all the talk lately about fake news, this political witch hunt by some of the media is based on some of the most flimsy reporting and is frankly shameful and disgraceful," Spicer said.
He continued, "The fact that BuzzFeed and CNN made the decision to run with this unsubstantiated claim is a sad and pathetic attempt to get clicks. The report is not an intelligence report – plain and simple."
Trump called the report "nonsense" during his first press conference since the election.
"I must say I want to thank a lot of the news organizations here today because they looked at that nonsense that was released by maybe the intelligence agencies, who knows, but maybe the intelligence agencies, which would be a tremendous blot on their record if they in fact did that, a tremendous blot. Because a thing like that should never have been written, it should never been had, and it certainly never have been released," Trump said.
"I think it's a disgrace that information would be let out. I saw the information, I read the information outside of that meeting," he said, a reference to a classified briefing he received from intelligence leaders. "It's all fake news, it's phony stuff, it didn't happen. It was gotten by opponents of ours," Trump declared in his first news conference since late July.
A U.S. official told The Associated Press on Tuesday that intelligence officials had informed Trump last week about an unsubstantiated report that Russia had compromising personal and financial information about him. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because the official was not allowed to publicly discuss the matter. Trump and President Barack Obama were briefed on the intelligence community's findings last week, the official said.
Media outlets reported on the document late Tuesday, and Trump quickly took to Twitter to denounce it as "fake news." He suggested that he's being persecuted for defeating other GOP presidential hopefuls and Democrat Hillary Clinton in the election.
"I win an election easily, a great 'movement' is verified, and crooked opponents try to belittle our victory with FAKE NEWS. A sorry state!" he tweeted early Wednesday. "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?"
A spokesman for President Vladimir Putin, meanwhile, denied allegations that Russia has compromising material on Trump. Spokesman Dmitry Peskov dismissed news reports as a "complete fabrication and utter nonsense." He insisted that the Kremlin "does not engage in collecting compromising material."
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