President Trump To CIA: Media Is Dishonest, Crowds Were Large
Updated In his first visit as president to CIA headquarters, Donald Trump resumed his campaign habit of bashing the media (“dishonest”) and took issue with news reports about the Inauguration Day crowd sizes.
Later in the afternoon, both CNN and MSNBC reported that White House spokesman Sean Spicer held his first official press briefing to scold the media for its reports on the crowd size, which Spicer called “deliberately false reporting.”
President Trump, in what was planned as a goodwill effort after his public criticisms of the nation’s intelligence community, focused heavily on the media’s coverage of his first day in office. Trump estimated the crowd at his inauguration at more than “a million” and accused the media of under-reporting the numbers. At one point he seemed to suggest a network used doctored or misleading photos that showed crowds much smaller than his estimates. (See video above).
He also took shots at the media for manufacturing a feud between himself and intelligence agencies. Repeating his usual description of journalists – “the most dishonest people on the earth” – Trump, who recently tweeted a reference to Nazi Germany with regard to agency investigations into his ties with Russia, said the media “made it sound like I have a feud with the intelligence community and it’s exactly the opposite.”
The speech was carried live by the cable news networks, with Trump standing in front of the CIA headquarters wall honoring the agency’s dead.
[youtube=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=54r17H6lvrY&w=605&h=340]
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