President-elect Donald Trump on Wednesday told CNN’s senior White House correspondent Jim Acosta that his network was “fake news” during Trump’s press conference which dealt, among other things, with a report saying that Russian hackers had sensitive information about Trump.
Trump and Acosta got into a shouting match when Acosta insisted on asking the President-elect a question after Trump dismissed CNN’s report from Tuesday about the Russian hackers.
Trump refused to let Acosta ask his question and told him that his organization “is terrible” and tried to give another reporter a chance to ask a question. Acosta kept insisting on asking his question, and Trump told him, “Don’t be rude”, before concluding with, “You are fake news.”
CNN later responded to the incident in a written statement in which it insisted its report about the hackers was accurate.
“CNN's decision to publish carefully sourced reporting about the operations of our government is vastly different than Buzzfeed's decision to publish unsubstantiated memos. The Trump team knows this. They are using Buzzfeed's decision to deflect from CNN's reporting, which has been matched by the other major news organizations,” the statement said.
“We are fully confident in our reporting. It represents the core of what the First Amendment protects, informing the people of the inner workings of their government; in this case, briefing materials prepared for President Obama and President-elect Trump last week.
“We made it clear that we were not publishing any of the details of the 35-page document because we have not corroborated the report's allegations. Given that members of the Trump transition team have so vocally criticized our reporting, we encourage them to identify, specifically, what they believe to be inaccurate,” the network said.
Russia, meanwhile, denied earlier on Wednesday that it had any damaging material on Trump.
“The Kremlin does not have compromising information on Trump," Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aide Dmitry Peskov said.