The White House continued to push back Friday afternoon against accusations that presidential Chief of Staff Reince Priebus acted inappropriately by asking the FBI to refute media reports about alleged contact between Trump campaign officials and Russia last year.
White House press secretary Sean Spicer cited a report on CNN claiming that the White House exerted “pressure” on the FBI, and said it was untrue.
“Pressure, by definition, is applying force,” Mr. Spicer said. “If we had said, ’If you don’t do this, if you don’t do that,’ that’s pressure. That would have been wrong. I don’t know what else we were supposed to do. Had we not done anything, it would have been irresponsible and frankly malpractice.”
White House officials said FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe told Mr. Priebus on Feb. 15 after a meeting on an unrelated matter that a New York Times story on the alleged Russia connections was not accurate. Mr. Spicer said Mr. Priebus asked Mr. McCabe to tell the media about it, but both he and FBI Director James B. Comey declined.
Mr. Spicer suggested that the White House still believes the FBI’s handing of the matter was wrong.
“If the FBI knows something to be false, unless it hinders intelligence gathering, an ongoing investigation — our job isn’t to get in the way of them doing their job,” he said. “But to come to somebody and say, ’You’ve been accused of some pretty serious things, and we know them not to be accurate — isn’t their job justice?”
The briefing by Mr. Spicer was held in his office, for a selected pool of reporters, which raised objections from some media outlets and the White House Correspondents Association. Mr. Spicer said he believed a full press briefing on camera was unnecessary because President Trump had given a speech earlier in the day at the Conservative Political Action Conference.
“We don’t need to do everything on camera every day. I wanted to make sure the president’s message carried,” he said.
The FBI on Friday declined to comment on the version of events described by the White House.
• Andrea Noble contributed to this report.
• Dave Boyer can be reached at dboyer@washingtontimes.com.
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