‘Egg on their face…’
The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Thursday that some news outlets will be left “with egg on their face” over their reporting on the Russia investigation.
North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr issued the warning in an interview with CNN. He had been asked to respond to a tweet from President Trump calling on the committee to look into “Fake News Networks” in order to “see why so much of our news is just made up.” (RELATED: Trump Wonders Why Senate Intel Isn’t Focusing On ‘Fake News Networks’)
“FAKE!” Trump wrote on Twitter.
That tweet was an apparent response to a status update provided by Burr and Senate Intelligence Committee vice-chairman Mark Warner on Wednesday regarding the panel’s investigation into Russian interference in the presidential campaign.
Burr made news by saying that the committee is still looking into whether members of the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government. But implicit in his statement is that the committee, which opened its investigation in January, has still not found evidence of collusion. Burr also said that the committee has still not been able to determine whether the infamous Trump dossier — the main source of the allegations about collusion — is credible. (RELATED: Senate Intel Committee Doesn’t Know If Dossier Is Credible)
In his remarks on Thursday, Burr did not say which news outlets have given inaccurate coverage of the Russia probe. But he said that the outlets will be held “accountable.”
“If, in fact, we find that news organizations have not covered it factually, I think that you’ll see that in our report,” Burr told CNN.
“You’ll see that in our hearings, and you should expect it because I think that the reporting of this — judging just by yesterday’s press conference — is loose at best, and they’ll have to stand behind what they report.”
Burr clarified that the Senate committee is not investigated news outlets. Instead, the panel will be “holding them accountable for what they say with no sources to substantiate the facts.”
“It will be the news organizations that covered it somewhere differently that will be the ones with egg on their face,” Burr told CNN. “So I’m very, very confident that we’ll lay it out there in a way that the American people will tell who was covering this factually and who was sensationalizing the coverage.”
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