President-elect Donald Trump criticized U.S. intelligence officials during a television interview that aired Wednesday for their role in compiling a memo that suggested Russia might have compromising information on him.
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During an appearance on Fox News' Fox & Friends, Trump backed away from a suggestion on Twitter this week that CIA Director John Brennan might have leaked the salacious allegations about him to the media, saying he accepted Brennan's denial.
"But it came out of someplace," Trump told host Ainsley Earhardt during an interview taped Tuesday at Trump Tower in New York. "And it's fake news. It's all fake news."
"They should not have been a part of it," Trump said. "Because it's made up. Never existed. Never happened. And the reason I say that so strongly because nothing's ever going to show up. There's never going to be a tape that shows up. There's never going to be anything that shows up."
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Trump added that he would be "very embarrassed if a tape actually showed up saying something like that. It would be double embarrassed, because I'm saying there is no tape, there is no tape. There was no event."
Trump was referring to allegations in a 35-page dossier packed with details of supposed compromising personal information and alleged financial entanglements. A two-page summary was attached to a report on alleged Russian election interference commissioned by the White House and presented to President Barack Obama and Trump earlier this month.
U.S. intelligence officials say they had not substantiated the allegations, which were drawn from "opposition research" done by a political research firm.
"They made stuff up, and it started with the Republican Party when they tried to beat me in the nomination, and then ... the Democrats took over that work supposedly, and by the intelligence giving it credence, a little bit of credence, by just even talking about it, it was very inappropriate," Trump said. "So I don't know who the leaker was, I have no idea, but it's fake news."
Anxious over Trump's friendly words for the Kremlin, European leaders are scrambling to get face time with the new American president before he can meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
One leader has raised with Trump the prospect of a U.S.-European Union summit early this year, and the head of NATO -- the powerful military alliance Trump has deemed "obsolete" -- is angling for an in-person meeting ahead of Putin as well. British Prime Minister Theresa May is working to arrange a meeting in Washington soon after Friday's inauguration.
For European leaders, a meeting with a new American president is always a sought-after -- and usually easy-to-obtain -- invitation. But Trump has defied precedent, making them uncertain about their standing once he takes office.
"There are efforts on the side of the Europeans to arrange a meeting with Trump as quickly as possible," said Norbert Roettgen, the head of the German Parliament's foreign committee and a member of Chancellor Angela Merkel's party.
Eager to stage an early show of trans-Atlantic solidarity, Donald Tusk -- the former Polish prime minister who heads the EU's Council of member state governments -- invited Trump to meet with the EU early in his administration, according to a European Union official. But a senior Trump adviser essentially rebuffed the offer, saying this week that such a gathering would not be a priority for the incoming president, who wants to focus on meetings with individual countries, not the 28-nation bloc.
Trump currently has no plans to meet with Putin, according to the senior adviser, who insisted on anonymity in order to discuss the transition team's internal planning. Aides denied a recent report in The Sunday Times of London that Trump's first foreign trip would be a summit with Putin in Reykjavik, Iceland, the site of a Cold War meeting between President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Still, Europe's leaders are eager to ensure they have Trump's ear before Putin does. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg is hoping to meet with Trump quickly, perhaps in Washington, according to a NATO official. And even if Trump rejects a U.S.-EU summit, European officials are said to have discussed the prospect of a smaller meeting with the U.S. president and the heads of the continent's most powerful countries, including Merkel.
Information for this article was contributed by John Wagner of The Washington Post and by Julie Pace, Kirsten Grieshaber, Frank Jordans, Raf Casert and Lorne Cook of The Associated Press.
A Section on 01/19/2017