At a news conference from the East Room of White House President Donald Trump reacts to a question regarding the firing or resignation of National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Listen in and here is the transcript:

Mara. Mara, go ahead. You were cut off pretty violently at our last news conference.

Q Did you fire Mike Flynn?

THE PRESIDENT: Mike Flynn is a fine person, and I asked for his resignation. He respectfully gave it. He is a man who — there was a certain amount of information given to Vice President Pence, who is with us today. And I was not happy with the way that information was given.

He didn’t have to do that, because what he did wasn’t wrong, what he did in terms of the information he saw. What was wrong was the way that other people, including yourselves in this room, were given that information, because that was classified information that was given illegally. That’s the real problem. And you can talk all you want about Russia, which was all a fake news, fabricated deal to try and make up for the loss of the Democrats, and the press plays right into it. In fact, I saw a couple of the people that were supposedly involved with all of this — they know nothing about it. They weren’t in Russia, they never made a phone call to Russia, they never received a phone call. It’s all fake news. It’s all fake news.

The nice thing is I see it starting to turn, where people are now looking at the illegal, Mara — and I think it’s very important — the illegal giving out classified information. And let me just tell you, it was given out, like, so much. I’ll give you an example. I called, as you know, Mexico. It was a very confidential, classified call, but I called Mexico. And in calling Mexico, I figured, oh, well, that’s — I spoke to the President of Mexico, had a good call. All of a sudden it’s out for the world to see. It’s supposed to be secret. It’s supposed to be either confidential or classified in that case. Same thing with Australia. All of a sudden people are finding out exactly what took place.

The same thing happened with respect to General Flynn. Everybody saw this, and I’m saying — the first thing I thought of when I heard about it is, how does the press get this information that’s classified? How do they do it? You know why? Because it’s an illegal process, and the press should be ashamed of themselves. But, more importantly, the people that gave out the information to the press should be ashamed of themselves. Really ashamed.