President Trump knocked NBC News on Friday after the network issued a correction to a story claiming Trump’s lawyer had been wiretapped by the FBI.
In a tweet, the president called the network “now as bad as Fake News CNN” after NBC on Thursday corrected a story after three U.S. officials disputed the network’s wiretap report.
{mosads}
“NBC NEWS is wrong again! They cite “sources” which are constantly wrong. Problem is, like so many others, the sources probably don’t exist, they are fabricated, fiction! NBC, my former home with the Apprentice, is now as bad as Fake News CNN. Sad!” Trump tweeted.
NBC’s report, which relied on two unnamed U.S. officials, claimed that Cohen was under FBI surveillance and that the agency had placed wiretaps on his phones. That report was later updated to claim the surveillance used was actually a “pen register,” which requires a lower standard of evidence to approve and does not pick up the content of tracked calls.
“Correction: Earlier today NBC News, and this reporter, said that Michael Cohen’s phone lines were wiretapped. 3 Senior U.S. Officials now dispute that, saying the monitoring was limited to a log of calls (pen register) not a wiretap of Cohen’s lines. We will continue to report,” one of the story’s reporters, Tom Winter, tweeted following the correction.
Trump routinely bashes the mainstream news media for reports based on unnamed sources, which the president suggests often do not exist and amount to “fake news.”
“Whenever you see the words ‘sources say’ in the fake news media, and they don’t mention names…it is very possible that those sources don’t exist but are made up by fake news writers. #FakeNews is the enemy!” Trump tweeted last year.