President-elect Donald Trump unleashed a Twitter tirade Wednesday, denouncing as “fake news” unverified reports about a dossier that reveals salacious allegations about him – and questioning whether “we are living in Nazi Germany.”
“Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to ‘leak’ into the public. One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany,” he tweeted about 8 a.m.
“I win an election easily, a great ‘movement’ is verified, and crooked opponents try to belittle our victory with FAKE NEWS. A sorry state,” wrote Trump, who will hold his first news conference in nearly six months at 11 a.m. Wednesday at Trump Tower.
The Kremlin also lashed back against the allegations that it collected the compromising information about Trump — dismissing them as a “complete fabrication and utter nonsense.”
“The Kremlin has no compromising dossier on Trump, such information isn’t consistent with reality and is nothing but an absolute fantasy,” said Dmitry Peskov, a spokesman for President Vladimir Putin, The Washington Post reported.
“This is an evident attempt to harm our bilateral ties,” Peskov told reporters in Moscow. “The Kremlin does not engage in collecting compromising information.”
Trump continued his attack by tweeting: “Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA – NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!”
“Russia just said the unverified report paid for by political opponents is ‘A COMPLETE AND TOTAL FABRICATION, UTTER NONSENSE.’ Very unfair!” he wrote.
US intelligence officials last week presented a two-page synopsis of the classified report to President Obama and Trump, according to CNN and The New York Times, who cited unnamed US officials with knowledge of the meeting.
The summary included allegations that Russian intelligence services have compromising information and material on Trump’s sex life and finances. The FBI was provided with the information in August — more than two months before the Nov. 8 election.
Obama said he hadn’t yet seen media reports about the bombshell revelations, as he delivered his farewell address Tuesday with 10 days to go in his presidency.
He added, however, that he hoped Congress and the Trump Administration would continue to try to find answers about who is behind the hacking scandals that have roiled US politics.
CNN gave no details of the allegations but BuzzFeed published — without corroborating its contents — a 35-page dossier of memos on which the synopsis is based.
The dossier was originally compiled by a former British MI-6 intelligence operative initially hired by anti-Trump Republicans to do political “opposition research” on the candidate in the middle of last year, CNN reported.
BuzzFeed admitted in an introduction to its dossier report that the claims were “unverified” – but Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith notified his staff that he decided to publish them because “this dossier reflects how we see the job of reporters in 2017.”
Peskov, Putin’s spokesman, said the report was a hoax intended harm already abysmal US-Russia relations, the Washington Post reported.
“You have to react to this with a certain humor, but there’s also a sad side to this,” Peskov said Wednesday, refuting his own alleged role in leading an effort to undermine Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton that is described in the report.
“Hysteria is being whipped up to maintain a political witch hunt,” he added.
Nikolai Kovalyov, a legislator and former head of the Federal Security Service, Russia’s domestic intelligence agency, also denounced the report.
“Certainly, there is no compromising material,” Kovalyov told the Interfax news agency Wednesday.
“Who is interested in gathering compromising material on a man who came here to organize a beauty contest?” Kovalyov said. “I can tell you from my professional experience that Russia does not have such practices.”
Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova also blasted the report.
“God created the world in seven days,” she said. “The Obama Administration has two more days to destroy it.”
Democrats were left stunned by the shocking developments, with House Democrat Jared Polis tweeting that if the reports are true, “he should not be president,” AFP reported.