Donald Trump clashes with CNN, Buzzfeed over fake news reporting

The President-elect has clashed with a CNN reporter during an extraordinary exchange that prompted applause | WATCH

President-elect Donald Trump clashed with a CNN journalist during his first post-election news conference.

Donald Trump berated some sections of the media and denied explosive allegations about his ties with Russia during his first press conference since November.

The 70-year-old billionaire angrily accused CNN of being “fake news” and called BuzzFeed — which published a dossier with the allegedly incriminating material drawn up by a former British intelligence agent hired to do “opposition research” on Trump — a “failing pile of garbage.”

“It’s all fake news. It’s phony stuff. It didn’t happen,” he said, referring to allegations of lurid behaviour in a Moscow hotel room.

“It was a group of opponents that got together, sick people, and they put that crap together,” Trump said.

“I think it’s a disgrace that information would be let out,” Trump said. It “was released by maybe the intelligence agencies, who knows, but maybe the intelligence agencies, which would be a tremendous blot on their record,” Trump said, later saying it was “disgraceful.”

On Twitter, he earlier decried a political “witch hunt” against him and asked: “Are we living in Nazi Germany?”

Trump dodged specific questions about whether his campaign had contacts with Russian intelligence, instead tearing into reporters whose outlets reported the suggestions of compromising material.

“I’m not going to give you a question. You are fake news,” he said to a CNN reporter, igniting a fresh raft of questions about his respect for constitutional guarantees about the free press.

Trump warned BuzzFeed they would “suffer the consequences.”

The US intelligence community has already concluded Moscow interfered in the November election in a bid to tip the race in Trump’s favour.

But intelligence chiefs last week presented America’s incoming 45th president, as well as current President Barack Obama, with a two-page synopsis on the potentially embarrassing but unsubstantiated allegations involving Russia, according to CNN and The New York Times.

Even before the new allegations surfaced, Trump’s Republican allies had become increasingly uneasy about Russia’s role in the election, with calls for an independent investigation growing.

The Kremlin has dismissed the dossier as a “total fake” aimed at damaging bilateral ties.

CNN says its decision to publish “carefully sourced reporting” on unverified intelligence documents concerning Donald Trump is “vastly different than BuzzFeed’s decision to publish unsubstantiated memos.”

AFP/Reuters