President-elect Donald Trump will hold his first post-election press conference at 11:00am in New York City on Wednesday.
The event is now more significant than ever following the release late Tuesday night of unverified claims that Russia has been “cultivating, supporting, and assisting” Trump for at least five years—and that the Kremlin has been using compromising personal and financial information to blackmail him.
The Guardian is providing live updates on the leaks here.
Watch live below:
The press conference was originally slated to address Trump’s myriad conflicts of interest—and while he is still expected to do so, many are also likely to ask questions about the dossier, which was reportedly compiled by a former British intelligence operative and is based largely on information from Russian sources. The leaks, published by Buzzfeed, allege that the blackmail fodder was so compromising that intelligence agencies shared it last week with both Trump and President Barack Obama.
It has been 167 days since Trump last held a press conference. In that time, he has sent at least 1,601 tweets, the latest of which focus on his alleged ties to Russia.
“Intelligence agencies should never have allowed this fake news to ‘leak’ into the public. One last shot at me. Are we living in Nazi Germany?” he wrote in one, doubling down on his contentious relationship with the departments he will soon oversee.
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