President Trump and CNN’s Jim Acosta had a testy exchange Tuesday over the issue of truthfulness during a news conference in India.
Acosta first asked the president if he could “pledge to the American people that you will not accept any foreign assistance in the upcoming election?”
“First of all, I want no help from any country,” Trump responded. “And I haven’t been given help from any country and if you see what CNN, your wonderful network, said, I guess they apologized in a way for — didn’t they apologize for the fact that they said certain things that weren’t true? Tell me, what was their apology yesterday? What did they say?”
“Mr. President,” Acosta replied, “I think our record on delivering the truth is a lot better than yours sometimes if you don’t mind me saying."
“Let me tell you about your record, your record is so bad you ought to be ashamed of yourself,” Trump continued. “You probably have the worst record in the history of broadcasting.”
“I’m not ashamed of anything and our organization is not ashamed,” Acosta replied.
Trump then got back to responding to his second question about replacing Joe Maguire as Acting Director of National Intelligence with Richard Grenell.
“On March 11 his time ended anyway, so his time came up,” Trump said. “So we would have had to, by statute, changed him anyway.”
Watch: CNN’s Jim @Acosta and President @realDonaldTrump just had quite a clash over Russia pic.twitter.com/eNyzavWuzi
— TV News HQ (@TVNewsHQ) February 25, 2020