With False Claims, Trump Attacks Media on Turnout and Intelligence Rift

Trump’s Inauguration vs Obama’s : Comparing the Crowds

Washington, 24 Rabiul Akhir 1438/23 January 2017 (MINA) – President Trump used his first full day in office on Saturday to unleash a remarkably bitter attack on the news media, falsely accusing journalists of both inventing a rift between him and intelligence agencies and deliberately understating the size of his inauguration crowd.

In a visit to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) intended to showcase his support for the intelligence community, Mr. Trump ignored his own repeated public statements criticizing the intelligence community, a group he compared to Nazis just over a week ago.

He also called journalists “among the most dishonest human beings on earth,” and he said that up to 1.5 million people had attended his inauguration, a claim that photographs disproved, nytimes.com reported.

Later, at the White House, he dispatched Sean Spicer, the press secretary, to the briefing room in the West Wing, where Mr. Spicer scolded reporters and made a series of false statements.

He said news organizations had deliberately misstated the size of the crowd at Mr. Trump’s inauguration on Friday in an attempt to sow divisions at a time when Mr. Trump was trying to unify the country, warning that the new administration would hold them to account.

The statements from the new president and his spokesman came as hundreds of thousands of people protested against Mr. Trump, a crowd that appeared to dwarf the one that gathered the day before when he was sworn in. It was a striking display of invective and grievance at the dawn of a presidency, usually a time when the White House works to set a tone of national unity and to build confidence in a new leader.

Aerial photographs and video showed the crowds were significantly smaller than when Barack Obama took over as president in 2009.

The Washington subway system said it had 193,000 riders by 11 am on Friday (local time), compared with 513,000 at that time during the 2009 inauguration. (T/RS05/RS01)

Mi’raj Islamic News Agency (MINA)