President Donald Trump attacked CNN and ABC for recent reporting errors in stories involving the investigation into potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Russian officials during the 2016 election.
“We’re going to cut right through the fake news media. We’re going to speak the truth,” Trump said during a Friday night rally in Florida. “Did you see all the corrections the media’s been making? ... They’ve been apologizing left and right.”
The president then referred to ABC’s Brian Ross, who was suspended last week after inaccurately reporting that former national security adviser Michael Flynn said he would testify that Trump directed him to contact Russian officials during the campaign, as a “fraudster.”
“They suspended him for a month. They should have fired him for what he wrote,” Trump said. “He drove the stock market down 350 points in minutes, which, by the way, tells me they really like me, right? When you think of it. You know what he cost people? And I said to everybody, get yourself a lawyer and sue ABC News.”
Trump then called out CNN for a Friday story regarding emails his eldest son received regarding WikiLeaks during the 2016 campaign.
“They apologized! Oh, thank you CNN,” he said. “Thank you so much. You should have been apologizing for the last two years.”
Earlier Friday, CNN initially reported that Donald Trump Jr. and others in the Trump Organization had received an email on Sep. 4, 2016, giving them access to hacked WikiLeaks documents before they were publicly available. However, the email in question was actually sent on Sep. 14, 2016. Since the hacked documents were public by then, the email is much less of a smoking gun indicating collusion between Trump officials and WikiLeaks. (CBS News made the same mistake in its reporting on the email.)
Trump Jr. attacked the story on Twitter:
The president has frequently dismissed CNN as “fake news,” particularly when the network runs unflattering stories about his administration.
Shortly before his inauguration, he refused to answer a CNN reporter’s questions during a news conference.
“You are fake news!” Trump yelled at the reporter.
That’s since become one of the presidents more frequent Twitter refrains.
And in July, he tweeted a 2007 clip of himself beating up WWE owner Vince McMahon with CNN’s logo superimposed on McMahon’s head, which raised concerns he was appearing to endorse violence against the network and its journalists.