US president-elect Donald Trump unleashed his ire on the two media outlets that first published details of a dossier on Tuesday that claimed he was being blackmailed by the Russian government after they obtained video of him committing a sex act with prostitutes in a Moscow hotel room.
In his first press conference since being elected, Trump called BuzzFeed “a pile of garbage” for publishing the allegations and refused to answer a question from CNN.
“Be quiet. I’m not going to give you a question. You are fake news,” Trump told CNN reporter Jim Acosta at the press conference.
On Tuesday, CNN reported that a memo claiming that Russia had compromising materials on Trump was shared with the outgoing president and the president-elect by the US intelligence community.
Later in the day, Buzzfeed published the entire set of memos.
CNN’s Jake Tapper criticized Trump for conflating CNN and BuzzFeed, since CNN did not publish the specific allegations and BuzzFeed did.
“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,” CNN said in a statement.
The report published by BuzzFeed said that while staying at the Moscow Ritz Carlton, Trump reportedly requested the presidential suite, where he knew Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama had previously stayed during an official trip to Russia.
His conduct there included “defiling the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him,” the report said.
