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Donald Trump calls media the ‘enemy’ after leaks

US president Donald Trump chastised the media for its reporting on Russia.

US president Donald Trump chastised the media for its reporting on Russia. Photo: EPA

As a congressional investigation of his campaign team’s alleged ties to Russia gathers steam, Donald Trump has stepped up his attack on news media outlets following the publication of a draft White House Memo that appeared to reveal the administration’s plans to have National Guard enforce immigration laws.

The White House was quick to shoot down a report from The Associated Press referencing an 11-page proposal from Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly that detail a crackdown on border security involving “up to 100,000 troops in 11 states”.

“Based on their training and experience, these men and women are particularly well-suited to assist in the enforcement of federal immigration law and augment border security operations by Department components,” the memo allegedly said.

Gillian M. Christensen, acting press secretary for the Department of Homeland Security, said the document was a “very early, pre-decisional draft that never made it to the secretary and was never seriously considered by the department”.

White House press secretary Sean Spicer said it is “100 per cent not true”.

“There is no effort at all to round up, to utilise the National Guard to round up illegal immigrants,” Mr Spicer said.

On Saturday, the US President took to Twitter to call the media “the enemy of the American people”.

“The FAKE NEWS media (failing NY Times, NBC News, ABC, CBS, CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American people!” Mr Trump tweeted on Saturday morning (AEDT).

Mr Trump’s claim follows an aggressive press conference on Friday in which he defended his administration as a “fine-tuned machine” and denied his team had made inappropriate contact with Russian officials during the election campaign.

The US Senate intelligence committee has sent formal requests to more than a dozen organisations, agencies and individuals, asking them to preserve all materials related to a probe the panel is conducting on Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The letters, authorised by committee chairman, North Carolina Republican Richard Burr and vice-chairman, Democrat Mark Warner, were dispatched on Friday – the same day committee members received a classified briefing from FBI Director James Comey.

Committee members declined to comment on what was discussed at the briefing, which went for more than hour.

It’s not the first time that Mr Trump has referred to unfavourable coverage as “fake news”, but for many journalists, the claim that they were “the enemy of the American people” crossed a line.

David Frum, a former speechwriter for George W Bush and a senior editor at The Atlantic, told MSNBC that the comment looked “a lot like an incitement to vigilante violence”.

“I think we are seeing here just a violation of every decent democratic, constitutional norm we ever thought the leaders of the country should be guided by,” he said.

Other journalists suggested Mr Trump’s language was of the kind you’d expect to hear in a repressive state:

It’s been a chaotic week for team Trump, with Republican senator John McCain on Friday telling a Munich Security Conference in Germany the administration is “in disarray”.

Trump is still trying to stabilise his national security team after he demanded the resignation of Michael Flynn following revelations he had misled Vice-President Mike Pence about his contacts with Russia.

Trump’s first choice to replace Flynn – retired Vice-Admiral Robert Harward – turned down the offer.

“I think that the Flynn issue obviously is something that shows that in many respects this administration is in disarray and they’ve got a lot of work to do,” Senator McCain said.

Trump tweeted on Friday that retired general Keith Kellogg, “who I have known for a long time, is very much in play for NSA – as are three others”.

– ABC/AP

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