Fox News defends CNN against Trump’s ‘fake news’ claim

A spokesman for Russia President Vladimir Putin has denied unverified reports that the Kremlin has collected compromising personal and financial information on US President-elect Donald Trump.

“Russia has never tried to use leverage over me”, Trump said. At a press conference full of artful misdirection on Wednesday, he reframed the Russian threat as a general problem of computer hacking by foreign powers. “He won’t be doing it. Russian Federation will have much greater respect when I’m leading than when other people are leading” the country, he said.

But don’t be misled. Peskov welcomed Trump’s readiness to conduct a dialogue with Russian Federation, adding that “it will help us find a way from many hard situations”.

Intelligence chiefs have reportedly been unable to verify the claims, which Russian Federation has dismissed as “utter nonsense”. In fact, Mother Jones first reported on the allegations in October, a week before the election, though the CNN report and BuzzFeed’s follow-up appear to be the first mainstream confirmation. Dan Coats of IN as director of national security, have a patriotic obligation to run down every lead, whatever their new boss might prefer.

The spread of this report about supposed damaging information about President-elect Donald Trump collected by Russian Federation became a public test of journalistic standards Tuesday but burst into public consciousness even as those standards were being debated.

At an ill-tempered news conference, he said if spies had given the unsubstantiated documents to the media it would be a “tremendous blot on their record”.

The aim of the alleged Russian government intelligence-gathering was to leverage the information to shift USA policy toward Russia, including by potentially blackmailing Trump, according to the memos.

“Too bad!”, Mr. Trump said on twitter on Thursday morning, a day after he slammed the intelligence agencies and news outlets for spreading “fake news”.

Such materials, known in Russian as “kompromat”, are frequently prepared by some intelligence agencies to create negative publicity for purposes of blackmail and to ensure loyalty. While multiple officials say the [synopsis] was included in the material prepared for the briefers, the senior official told NBC News that the briefing was oral and no actual documents were left with the Trump team in NY. It is absurd to pretend that he would be “completely isolated” – his lawyer’s words – from business decisions.

CNN said it reviewed the compilation of the memos, described as originating as opposition research first commissioned by anti-Trump Republicans, and later by Democrats. Nobody forced him to run for president. Incoming White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer addressed the allegations at the beginning of the Trump’s Wednesday press conference by calling BuzzFeed “highly irresponsible”, “left-wing blog”.

Many quickly pointed out that Trump could clear the matter up by releasing his tax returns, which he has refused to do. It says there was a “regular flow of intelligence from the Kremlin” to Mr. Trump’s campaign and there were monetary transactions between Paul Manafort, former chief of Trump campaign and Russian intermediaries. “What I want to ask back is, ‘Where’s the reporting?’ The job of reporting is to actually report”.