Top White House staffers provided Trump with fake news: report
Top White House staffers provided Trump with fake news: report, Top White House staffers, including former deputy national security adviser K.T. McFarland, are known to have provided President Trump with dubiously sourced news articles or outright fake stories, as part of an effort to get the commander-in-chief roiled or distracted, according to a report Monday.
Just weeks ago, McFarland, who has since been forced out of the White House and will reportedly be named the U.S. ambassador to Singapore, gave Trump a printout of a fake Time magazine cover from the 1970s that warned of an imminent ice age — a hoax image widely circulated on Internet message boards — along with a Time magazine cover from 2008 about global warming, Politico reported.
McFarland provided Trump with the contradicting printouts as part of an effort to get him "lathered up about the media' hypocrisy," Politico reported.
White House aides were able intervene before Trump tweeted, and days later Chief of Staff Reince Priebus warned senior staffers about "trying to secretly slip stuff" to Trump, Politico reported.
The situation with McFarland, Politico reported, was just the latest example in a bizarre pattern where well-placed staffers attempted to slip Trump — whose tweets have been known to be timed with the viewing or reading of various news reports — stories to manipulate his views on specific policy ideas or gain leverage in internal White House squabbles.
Politico cited another instance, in February, when an aide gave Trump a printout of an article from GotNews.com, a dubiously-sourced website run by Charles Johnson, accusing Kate Walsh, a deputy chief of staff" of being the source of various leaks.
Weeks later, Walsh was removed from her White House role and reassigned to an outside pro-Trump group.
A White House spokesperson did not immediately respond to questions about the allegations made in the Politico article.
