Trump encourages student suing the Washington Post over Covington coverage: 'Go get them Nick. Fake News!'
President Trump egged on a student a suing the Washington Post for its coverage of a confrontation in Washington with a Native American man that the teen says distorted reality.
Covington Catholic student Nick Sandmann, 16, is suing the Washington Post for defamation. He claims the newspaper falsely accused him of racist acts and instigating a face-off with a Native American activist in the January incident.
Trump gave Sandmann is his backing on Wednesday morning after watching a segment on the lawsuit, and other inaccurate media stories, on 'Fox & Friends. The president quoted Sandmann's suit and said, 'Go get them Nick.
In a another tweet, Trump, who routinely harangues the Post and other news outlets he believes are biased, predicted the end of the media as an industry in a half-decade.
Trump often calls news outlets with which he has disputes 'fake news' and the 'enemy of the people' when he's particularly outraged.
The Washington Post is a favorite target of Trump's. The billionaire president has a beef with the paper's owner, Bezos, who happens to be significantly wealthier than him.
In a weekend tweet Trump repeated his claim that the media is not only 'rigged and corrupt' but the true 'enemy' of the American public.
Tweeting on Wednesday amid an winter snow storm, he said: 'The Press has never been more dishonest than it is today. Stories are written that have absolutely no basis in fact.
The writers don't even call asking for verification. They are totally out of control. Sadly, I kept many of them in business. In six years, they all go BUST!'.
Later in the morning he slammed another paper, The New York Times, for a report it ran on his conversations with recently departed acting Attorney General Matt Whitaker.
The paper claimed that Trump asked Whitaker to interfere in the federal case against Michael Cohen, a former fixer for him who flipped to receive a reduced jail sentence.
Trump says Cohen is making stories up to fulfill his end of the bargain.
Raging about the report on Twitter, which he'd called 'fake' to reporters the day before, Trump said, 'The New York Times reporting is false. They are a true ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!'.
Possibly taking a page out of the litigious president's book, Sandmann is suing the Post over its reporting on his confrontation on the National Mall with a Native American elder.
A viral video of the incident suggested that Sandmann was blocking the man's path, but subsequent video and testimony from Covington students called initial reporting into dispute.
The lawsuit, filed on Tuesday in U.S. District Court in Kentucky seeks $250 million in damages, the amount that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos paid for the Post in 2013.
The lawsuit claims that the newspaper 'wrongfully targeted and bullied' the teen to advance its bias against President Donald Trump because Sandmann is a white Catholic who wore a Make America Great Again souvenir cap on a school field trip to the March for Life pro-life rally in Washington, D.C.
The Washington Post's Vice President for Communications Kristine Coratti Kelly said: 'We are reviewing a copy of the lawsuit and we plan to mount a vigorous defense.
In a photo that went viral from the incident, Sandmann is seen standing face to face with Native American activist Nathan Phillips. Sandmann stares smiling at him while Phillips sings and plays his drum.
The incident sparked outrage on social media. In early articles, the Post reported that the schoolboys 'surrounded' and 'taunted' 64-year-old Phillips. The newspaper claimed that a 'smirking' Sandmann had stood in Phillip's path, blocking him from moving.
More extensive video of the events told a radically different story, showing the boys were subjected to racist abuse by a group of Black Hebrew Israelites, before Phillips waded into the group of students and banged his drum directly in Sandmann's face.
In a statement, Sandmann's Atlanta-based lawyer, Lin Wood, said additional similar lawsuits would be filed against other parties in the weeks ahead.
A private investigation firm retained by Covington Diocese in Park Hills, Kentucky, found in a report released last week no evidence the teenagers provoked a confrontation.
The students were met at the Lincoln Memorial by offensive statements from members of the Black Hebrew Israelites, the report said.
The investigation also determined that the students did not direct any racist or offensive comments toward Phillips although several performed a 'tomahawk chop' to the beat of his drum.
Phillips claimed in a separate video that he heard the students chanting 'build that wall,' during the encounter, a reference to Trump's pledge to build a barrier along the U.S.
The investigators said they found no evidence of such a chant and that Phillips did not respond to multiple attempts to contact him.
In a letter to parents this week, Covington Bishop Roger Foys said the students 'were placed in a situation that was at once bizarre and even threatening'.
'The immediate world-wide reaction to the initial video led almost everyone to believe that our students had initiated the incident and the perception of those few minutes of video became reality,' the bishop wrote.
Students told investigators that they felt Phillips was coming into their group to join their own cheers, which were meant to drown out insults from the Black Hebrew Israelites.
They claimed that they were confused but did not feel threatened by Phillips, the report said.
'We found no evidence of racist statements to Mr Phillips or members of his group,' the report said. 'Some students performed a "tomahawk chop" to the beat of Mr Phillips' drumming and some joined in Mr Phillips' chant.'.
The investigators also reviewed related videos, including one made the same day in which a young person says: 'It's not rape if you enjoy it. The investigators say they determined that person was not a Covington Catholic student.
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