‘Treason!’ Trump slams NYT claim of US cyberattacks on Russia’s power grid as harmful fake news

Following a bombastic report that US government hackers are targeting Russia’s power grid, President Donald Trump took to Twitter to accuse the NY Times of spreading fake news detrimental to US credibility and national security.

“This is a virtual act of Treason by a once great paper so desperate for a story, any story, even if bad for our Country…” Trump tweeted on Saturday evening, before realizing that he forgot to actually dismiss the report of Washington increasingly targeting Moscow in a cyber-warfare campaign as “fake news.”

“.....ALSO, NOT TRUE!” he added in a follow-up tweet, without specifying whether the report was untrue in its entirety – or just the specifics like the targets of US cyber-offenses or their gravity.

The US leader also stopped short of explaining what exactly he believes constitutes treason – the mere fact that the paper unveiled Washington’s presumably top-secret operation, or that the revelation might further erode the US' image as the world’s moral beacon.

In an in-depth yet frustratingly void-of-details report on Saturday, the New York Times treated its readers to a carousel of security officials talking up their “aggressive” posture, including one faceless intelligence spook who bragged “We are doing things at a scale we never contemplated a few years ago.” Now just imagine the media hysteria if it were the other way around...

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