Trump Threatens to Report NBC Journalist Kristen Welker to FCC Over Election Endorsement Comments

United States President Donald Trump says he will report a prominent NBC television journalist to the federal agency in charge of regulating broadcast news outlets for “rebuke or punishment”.

In a post on Truth Social on Sunday, Trump took issue with Kristen Welker’s characterisation of his endorsements of electoral candidates as having “mixed results” in the primaries leading up to November’s elections.

“How can anyone be allowed to say this, working for freely given public airwaves?” Trump wrote. He also posted, without any attribution of where he got the data, a chart showing 98 percent of the candidates he endorsed had won their elections.

“Because of this purposeful inaccuracy, she will be reported to the FCC,” the Federal Communications Commission, he said.

Welker hosted the 2020 presidential election debate between Trump and former President Joe Biden and currently hosts NBC’s weekly news programme Meet the Press.

‘Crooked networks’

In June, Welker had a one-on-one interview with Trump that ended in a heated exchange as she pressed the Republican president on continuing to claim the Democratic Party had cheated in the 2020 presidential election, in which Biden defeated Trump.

“Your elections are crooked, and you’re crooked, and Meet the Press is crooked and so is ABC and CBS and CNN. You’re one-sided crooked networks,” Trump said shortly before pulling off his microphone and leaving the interview.

Trump, who has long had a tumultuous relationship with those US television news networks, has increasingly threatened to use the FCC to target what he says is false news.

This month, ABC News’s owner, Disney, sued the FCC, saying the agency was conducting an early licence review of eight of the network’s stations, a move that it said was “retaliation” against it. ABC said the FCC was seeking “a media industry too fearful of official reprisal to report the news freely”.

The review followed a row between the network and the FCC after Trump and his wife Melania called on it to fire late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel over a joke he had made about her.

President Trump has also filed several multibillion-dollar civil lawsuits against news outlets alleging defamation. Last year, he filed a $10bn lawsuit against the BBC, which he said unfairly edited a clip of him speaking just before his supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, to make it seem like he had called for violence.

Trump sued The New York Times for $15bn and The Wall Street Journal for $10bn, alleging defamation over reporting on issues such as how he amassed his wealth and his relationship to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. A judge threw out the case against The Wall Street Journal. Trump refiled the case against The New York Times after a judge dismissed the first complaint against the newspaper last year.

Attempts to compel reporters to reveal sources

The warning from Trump also comes as his administration has taken the rare step of using the courts to try to pressure journalists into giving up confidential sources for stories that have pointed out wrongdoing.

This month, The New York Times said agents from the FBI showed up at the home of one of its reporters in February to deliver a subpoena seeking cooperation for an investigation into a story that revealed how a secret US Navy SEALs mission in North Korea had ended up with them opening fire on a North Korean boat.

In July, the US Department of Justice also tried to subpoena three other journalists from the newspaper after they reported on security concerns with the president’s new Air Force One jet. Investigators were seeking phone records of the journalists but withdrew the requests after a federal judge upbraided the tactic in court, saying they were violating the First Amendment, a provision in the US Constitution that protects freedom of the press.

Reporters at The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post have also been subpoenaed in recent months for national security coverage, including for reporting on internal Pentagon warnings about the US-Israel war on Iran.