Trump: Mueller Stories Were "Corrupt" Reporting

President Trump dismissed the reporting on the Mueller investigation, with a particularly shot at NBC, in a wide-ranging interview Thursday night with one of his favorite TV commentators, Fox News' Sean Hannity.

Talking about one of the President's favorite subjects, the "witch hunt" report of Special Counsel Robert Mueller, the President dismissed most of the stories on the report as "corrupt reporting" and "fake news," the latter a term he said he was proud of, and suggested he even felt a little proprietary about.

He signaled that he thought the mainstream media's use of the term "fake news" to refer to stories they thought lacked credibility was a way for them to get around the "fact" that their news was fake.

"Now, they use it. You know, they use it to describe something. They think they get out of it by us[ing] it. They are tricky people. But they were fake, they were corrupt."

The President said it was enough to have to fight the "deep state," but that he also had to fight the "corrupt, mainstream, media."

The President has made CNN the poster-outlet for his attacks, but NBC may have taken the lead, in part because it did not cut the President some slack given his history with the outlet.

"I think NBC is more corrupt than CNN if that's possible," he said. "And I made them a lot of money with 'The Apprentice.' Can you believe it?...I figured at least they would give me, for whatever reason, they would give me great...but I think they were more hostile, frankly, than CNN, which is hard to believe. But this fake, horrible stuff, nobody can believe how dishonest they have been." 

John Eggerton

Contributing editor John Eggerton has been an editor and/or writer on media regulation, legislation and policy for over four decades, including covering the FCC, FTC, Congress, the major media trade associations, and the federal courts. In addition to Multichannel News and Broadcasting + Cable, his work has appeared in Radio World, TV Technology, TV Fax, This Week in Consumer Electronics, Variety and the Encyclopedia Britannica.