President Trump again calls Russian election interference a 'hoax' as Facebook turns over Russian-linked ads to Congress

Trump tweeted a day after Facebook turned over Russian-linked ads to Congress.

ByABC News
September 22, 2017, 10:40 AM

— -- President Donald Trump called Russian interference in the 2016 election "a hoax" again this morning, a day after Facebook said it would turn over some 3,000 Russia-linked political ads purchased during the 2016 election to congressional investigators.

"The Russia hoax continues, now it's ads on Facebook. What about the totally biased and dishonest Media coverage in favor of Crooked Hillary?" Trump wrote.

On Thursday, Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said it would release the ads and announced steps that the company will be taking to prevent interference in elections in the future.

The ads -- seen by millions of Americans -- ran on the social media site during the election and were previously linked by Facebook to a Russian company in St. Petersburg with ties to the Russian government.

Facebook reported earlier this month that fake accounts created by the Russian company, which Facebook officials referred to as a "troll farm," purchased at least $100,000 worth of political ads during the 2016 campaign.

Facebook’s chief security officer Alex Stamos said that most of the ads did not mention a specific presidential candidate or the election, but focused on “amplifying divisive social and political messages” on immigration, gun rights and LGBT issues.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va, vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, says it’s clear that those divisive messages were “often stories that would help one candidate and potentially hurt another,” part of a broader effort the intelligence community has determined was designed to aid Donald Trump and hurt Hillary Clinton.

Today's tweet was not the first time that Trump has called the issue of Russian election interference a hoax. In August, he slammed Sen. Richard Blumenthal, D-Conn., for "talking about hoax Russian collusion."

In July, he told The Wall Street Journal "that's a total witch hunt, the whole Russia story. It's a hoax. It's a hoax." Earlier that month he tweeted that the stock market hit a new high "despite the Russian hoax story!"

ABC News' Megan Christie, Matthew Mosk and Benjamin Siegel contributed to this report.

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