CNN's Jim Acosta responded to Trump's attacks on him during today's press conference and told Wolf Blitzer that the upcoming press secretary Sean Spicer said, "the incoming press secretary did say to me that if I were to do that again, I was going to be thrown out of this press conference.”
Earlier in the day, the president-elect refused to let CNN's Jim Acosta ask a question because he was furious of CNN's original reporting an called him,"fake news."
Wolf Blitzer asked, "You very assertively tried to get a question. He pointed at you and said he didn't want to take your question, he said 'fake news.' Tell us what it was like for you when you saw what was going on."
Acosta said that Trump indicated he wasn't going to call on him because of the CNN report from Tuesday.
Acosta said, "Then as the news conference went on, as you heard, he was attacking this news organization repeatedly, and I felt it was only fair that if our news organization is going to be attacked that we get a chance to ask a follow-up question about what Donald Trump was talking about..."
He continued, "...after I asked and I guess demanded that we have a question, Sean Spicer, the incoming press secretary did say to me that if I were to do that again, I was going to be thrown out of this press conference. Of course, Wolf, I had to persist there and try to get that question asked, but in the end the question was asked..."
There you are. The bullying of the press is now in high gear.
CNN did release a statement on Trump's attacks.
CNN's decision to publish carefully sourced reporting about the operations of our government is vastly different than Buzzfeed's decision to publish unsubstantiated memos. The Trump team knows this. They are using Buzzfeed's decision to deflect from CNN's reporting, which has been matched by the other major news organizations.
We are fully confident in our reporting. It represents the core of what the First Amendment protects, informing the people of the inner workings of their government; in this case, briefing materials prepared for President Obama and President-elect Trump last week. We made it clear that we were not publishing any of the details of the 35-page document because we have not corroborated the report's allegations. Given that members of the Trump transition team have so vocally criticized our reporting, we encourage them to identify, specifically, what they believe to be inaccurate.
You can be assured Trump surrogates will use bait and switch tactics against this report as they always do.
Also, Buzzfeed never claimed that the documents were authenticated and attacking them is a bad move on Jake Tapper's part.
I saw no such restraint from CNN or Tapper when they were reading every leaked document about the Clinton campaign from unverified sources almost daily to the advantage of the Trump campaign.
