Trump launches new round of attacks on media

Washington: US President Donald Trump has launched a new round of attacks against the US media, accusing them of being able to “cause war”.

In a flurry of tweets on Sunday, the President continued to cast the media as the “enemy of the people,” saying “They purposely cause great division & distrust. They can also cause war!”

That came amid heightened tensions between the Trump administration and US media, some which have been labelled by him as “the Fake News,” a move heavily criticized by journalists, Xinhua news agency reported.

Trump’s daughter and presidential adviser Ivanka Trump, however, doesn’t share the president’s stance, saying last week that she does not think the media is the “enemy of the people”.

Trump also fired another shot at the ongoing Russia probe, led by special counsel Robert Mueller, who’s looking into the alleged Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election and any potential collusion between the Trump campaign and Moscow.

Mueller is reportedly examining the president’s elder son, Donald Trump Jr., for his role in arranging a June 2016 meeting in Trump Tower in New York between a Russian attorney offering damaging information on Hillary Clinton and Trump campaign officials, including himself.

“This was a meeting to get information on an opponent, totally legal and done all the time in politics — and it went nowhere,” Trump defended his son in relation to the highly-scrutinised meeting.

The President also dismissed a Washington Post report that he’s concerned about the meeting and his son, while trying to distance himself from the incident.

IANS