Trump Calls on Senate Intelligence Committee to Investigate ‘Fake News Networks’

One of the Nation’s Top Peddlers of Fake News Calls on Congress to Investigate News He Doesn’t Like

President Donald Trump, clearly frustrated and obsessed with reports that say U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was close to resigning this summer, Thursday morning called for the Senate Intelligence Committee to investigate what he referred to as the “Fake News Networks.”

Trump, himself a frequent purveyor of fake news, later tweeted an attack on NBC News.

For the past 24 hours the media has been focused on an NBC News report stating the U.S. Secretary of State was close to resigning this summer, after President Trump’s highly inappropriate and politicized speech before tens of thousands of Boy Scouts. That report also stated the former Exxon CEO had called the president a “moron.” MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle Wednesday, after the Secretary of State held an unexpected press conference to deny the report, announced that her sources said Tillerson had actually called the president, in front of other White House aides, a “f*cking moron.”

Notably, the Secretary of State, when asked point-blank about the “moron” portion of the report, refused to deny he had used that word to describe the president. Instead, Tillerson called the issue “petty.” 

Trump, minutes after the press conference, took to Twitter to announce Tillerson had “totally refuted” the NBC News story, which is false.

There is no question a “fake news” problem exists in the U.S., and has done extensive damage to American democracy and to the nation as a whole. But President Trump’s repeated lies and insistence that any reporting unfavorable to him or his administration is “fake news” and should be investigated by one of the most powerful legislative committees in Congress is a fascistic act.

This is not the first time Trump has called on the Senate Intelligence Committee to do his bidding.

In January, two weeks before being sworn in, then-president-elect Trump also went after NBC News for reporting he did not like:

Later, as president, in March, Trump – pushing a fake news story himself – again called on the Senate Intelligence Committee, this time to go after his political opponent.

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