It appears U.S. President Donald Trump did in fact spend some of his first official day in office disputing widely circulated photos of his inauguration with the National Park Service.
According to emails obtained by CBS News from the National Park Service through the Freedom of Information Act, the new president was “directly involved” in the administration’s attempt to track down the person who retweeted the side-by-side photo comparison of crowd sizes at Trump’s inauguration versus Barack Obama’s.
“Obviously, this has become a very sensitive issue, especially since the President has gotten directly involved and contacted Acting Director Mike Reynolds concerned about one of the images that was retweeted,” CBS quoted a January 21 email between National Park Service Chief of Digital Strategy Tim Cash and Chief Information Security Officer Shaun Cavanaugh as saying.
READ MORE: Here’s why the picture of Donald Trump’s inauguration did not undersell crowd size
The Washington Post was first to report that Trump personally ordered park service head Michael Reynolds to produce additional photographs of the previous day’s crowds on the National Mall. The president believed that the photos might prove that the news media had lied in reporting that attendance had been no better than average.
A spokesman for the park service confirmed the call at the time but declined to reveal details of the conversation. White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said, “President Trump is someone who takes action and gets things done – this is one of the reasons he won and Hillary didn’t.”
The call from Trump came after the Interior Department briefly suspended park service accounts and others run by the department in response to the retweeted photos.
CBS obtained a memo that detailed the park service’s effort to track down the rogue retweeter.
“We traced the IP address used for the two questionable posts to an ISP in the San Bruno, Calif., area and checked all possible NPS social media points of contacts in that area,” CBS quoted the memo as saying.
On Jan. 21, Trump was speaking at Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) headquarters in Virginia when he accused the media of lying about the crowd size.
WATCH: Donald Trump speaks at CIA headquarters
“We had, it looked, honestly it looked like a million and a half people, whatever it was it was,” Trump said. “It went all the way back to the Washington Monument.”
Trump said that a U.S. news network showed “an empty field” and “said we drew 250,000 people.”
“Now that’s not bad, but it’s a lie. We had 250,000 people literally around that little ball we constructed, that was 250,000 people,” Trump said. “The rest of the 20 block-area all the way back to the Washington Monument was packed. So, we caught them and we caught them in a beauty.”
Following Trump’s comments at CIA headquarters, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer lashed out at the media over refuting the administration’s inauguration crowd numbers.
“This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration, period. Both in person and around the globe,” Spicer said.
–with a file from the Associated Press
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