Trump says media distorting democracy with coverage of son’s Russia meeting
President Donald Trump of the United States has been reported to have lashed out at the U.S. media Sunday, accusing it of “Distorting Democracy”.
The accusation was contained in the President’s reaction to media reports on the Trump Junior’s (eldest son’s) meeting last year with a Russian lawyer he thought would hand him incriminating information about Democrat Hillary Clinton ahead of the 2016 election.
In a string of Twitter comments from his golf resort in Bedminster, New Jersey, Trump defended Donald Trump Jr., who met with Natalia Veselnitskaya in June 2016 after being told by an intermediary that she was a Russian government attorney who would offer him information as part of Moscow’s support of Trump to defeat Clinton.
In one tweet, Trump said, “Hillary Clinton can illegally get the questions to the Debate & delete 33,000 emails but my son Don is being scorned by the Fake News Media?”
Trump was referring to emails she deleted from her private computer server while she was secretary of state and to being given a question in advance of one debate she had with a Democratic opponent months before the November national election she lost to Trump.
“With all of its phony unnamed sources & highly slanted & even fraudulent reporting, Fake News is DISTORTING DEMOCRACY in our country!” Trump claimed.
The White House Correspondents Association rejected Trump’s attack, saying, “A free and independent press actually is critical to democracy.”
The debate question involving Clinton only came to light because of the hacking of computer files at the Democratic National Committee in Washington, which the U.S. intelligence community has concluded was personally directed by Russian President Vladimir Putin in an effort to help Trump.
WikiLeaks subsequently released thousands of emails in the weeks ahead of the election, with many of them showing embarrassing behind-the-scenes efforts by Democratic operatives to help Clinton win the Democratic presidential nomination. She has partly blamed her loss on the disclosure of the emails.
with agency reports
