Trump claimed The New York Times used a 'phony source.' It was a White House briefing.


President Trump went after The New York Times on Twitter Saturday, revisiting his usual critiques of the paper's ethics and commercial viability. He also claimed an unnamed senior White House official the Times cited in a report on the North Korea summit was fabricated:
In reality, as recorded audio of a White House background briefing has demonstrated, the source is National Security Council official Matt Pottinger, and he was speaking in a White House-arranged conference call:
Other news organizations were present in the briefing and reported stories citing the same source. "I mean, every reporter on the call knows who this official was, and this official exists," said Mike Warren of the conservative Weekly Standard. "And we all heard the official say it."
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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