Lashes out...

Trump lashes out at Fox News amid impeachment fight

The president also again pledges to release his "financial statement" sometime before the election.

By QUINT FORGEY

President Donald Trump on Thursday complained about his media coverage as the second week of public impeachment hearings drew to a close, even blasting his preferred cable news network for interviewing a Democratic congressman investigating his conduct.

In a morning tweet, Trump lashed out at Fox News host Shannon Bream for a Wednesday segment on her weeknight newscast featuring Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), a member of the House Intelligence Committee and a frequent target of the president’s ire.

“Why do @ShannonBream & @FoxNews waste airtime on Democrat Rep. Eric Swalwell, who recently left the Presidential Primaries having attained a grand number of ZERO in the polls,” Trump wrote. “I don’t even know how that is possible. Fox should stay with the people that got them there, not losers!”

Trump has previously invoked Swalwell, a former Democratic presidential candidate, on social media at least four times this year, and similarly criticized Fox News’ coverage of the lawmaker in July.

The president in recent months has stepped up his attacks on the conservative-leaning network, whose opinion hosts consistently defend the White House in primetime programming.

In August, Trump grumbled that “Fox isn’t working for us anymore,” and in October he bashed Fox News’ bipartisan polling team, remarking online that “they suck.”

Trump on Thursday took aim at the press more generally as well, accusing reporters of unfairly chronicling explosive developments in the impeachment probe.

“The Republican Party, and me, had a GREAT day yesterday with respect to the phony Impeachment Hoax, & yet, when I got home to the White House & checked out the news coverage on much of television, you would have no idea they were reporting on the same event,” he wrote. “FAKE & CORRUPT NEWS!”

The president’s posts came ahead of scheduled appearances on Capitol Hill by former National Security Council staffer Fiona Hill and State Department official David Holmes, both of whom are expected to provide damaging congressional testimony.

In other messages Thursday, Trump again insisted his phone calls with Ukraine’s president, which lie at the heart of the impeachment inquiry, “were PERFECT” and that “there was NOTHING said that was wrong” during the conversations between the two leaders.

“I never in my wildest dreams thought my name would in any way be associated with the ugly word, Impeachment!” he wrote.

Trump repeatedly savaged House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and urged GOP members of Congress to continue arguing on behalf of the White House amid the contentious political battle.

“Keep fighting tough, Republicans, you are dealing with human scum who have taken Due Process and all of the Republican Party’s rights away from us during the most unfair hearings in American History,” he tweeted. “But we are winning big, and they will soon be on our turf.”

The president also wrote that “sometime prior” to the 2020 election, he would make public his “financial statement” — asserting that he is “clean” and that the document would show Americans he is “much richer than people even thought.”

Trump last claimed in September that he would release a report before Election Day providing a comprehensive accounting of his “financial condition.”

Attorneys for the president announced last week they would take to the Supreme Court a legal dispute with New York prosecutors seeking access to his tax returns. Trump on Friday derided the pursuit of his financial records as “not legal” and a continuation of former special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigative “Witch Hunt.”