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Video: Donald Trump Accuses Media Of Lying About Inauguration Crowd Size

WASHINGTON (AP/KDKA) - President Donald Trump is accusing the news media of lying about the size of the crowd that attended his inauguration.

Addressing employees at CIA headquarters in Virginia, Trump wrongly said the crowd had stretched all the way to the Washington Monument in the middle of the National Mall.

Photos taken of the Mall on Friday showed large swaths of empty space compared to Barack Obama's inauguration eight years ago.

Trump says the inauguration crowd looked to be about a million and a half people.

He also said of the weather: "God looked down and said 'we're not going to let it rain on your speech.'"

He says the news media will pay a "big price" for what he claims was dishonesty.

In a briefing Saturday, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer declared that Trump's inauguration had the largest audience in history "both in person and around the globe."

Sean Spicer insisted that, "This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period."

Spicer offered no evidence to support the claim.

It is not known how many people watched the ceremony on television around the globe. In the U.S., Nielsen estimates 31 million viewers watched TV coverage, but that's less than Barack Obama's and Ronald Reagan's first inaugurations.

Spicer convened reporters at the White House during Trump's first full day in office to accuse them of engaging in "deliberately false reporting." He's claiming that photographs of the inauguration were intentionally framed in a way to minimize the crowd.

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(TM and © Copyright 2017 CBS Radio Inc. and its relevant subsidiaries. CBS RADIO and EYE Logo TM and Copyright 2017 CBS Broadcasting Inc. Used under license. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.)

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