Trump scolds ‘Fake News Media’ – again
WASHINGTON — To paraphrase President Ronald Reagan, there he goes again!
President Trump went on a Twitter tirade Saturday against one of his favorite targets: the media. Or the “Fake News Media,” as he not-so-lovingly calls the nation’s scribes.
“Funny how the Fake News Media doesn’t want to say that the Russian group was formed in 2014, long before my run for President,” Trump wrote. “Maybe they knew I was going to run even though I didn’t know!”
Funny how the Fake News Media doesn’t want to say that the Russian group was formed in 2014, long before my run for President. Maybe they knew I was going to run even though I didn’t know!
Trump was referring to charges spelled out in a 37-page indictment issued Friday as a result of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election.
The indictment charges 13 Russian nationals and three businesses — including an Internet firm tied to the Kremlin — with conspiracy, identity theft, failing to register as foreign agents and violating laws that limit the use of foreign money in U. S. elections.
More: Indictment: Russians also tried to help Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein presidential campaigns
More: Meet the 13 Russians charged in Mueller probe
More: Trump’s claims of Russian meddling as a ‘hoax’ hit choppy waters with FBI indictments
Prosecutors said officials at that firm, the Internet Research Agency, described their work as “information warfare against the United States” and their goal as “spreading distrust toward the candidates and the political system.”
The indictment said the organization registered with the Russian government as a Russian corporate entity in July 2013 and nine months later formed a department called the “translator project” whose strategy included interfering with the 2016 election.
Trump entered the election on June 16,2015, after the Russian organization was formed — a fact that, contrary to Trump’s Twitter musings, was reported by many news organizations.
In another Twitter post on Saturday, Trump retweeted an anti-media diatribe from Rob Goldman, whose Twitter bio identifies him as the vice president of ads at Facebook.
The Fake News Media never fails. Hard to ignore this fact from the Vice President of Facebook Ads, Rob Goldman! https://t.co/XGC7ynZwYJ
“I have seen all of the Russian ads and I can say very definitively that swaying the election was *NOT* the main goal.” Rob Goldman Vice President of Facebook Ads https://t.co/A5ft7cGJkE
Goldman claimed in his tweet that most Russian ad spending happened after the election, but that few outlets wrote about that because it didn’t align with the narrative about Trump and the election.
“The Fake News Media never fails,” Trump wrote. “Hard to ignore this fact from the Vice President of Facebook Ads, Rob Goldman!”
