Trump adviser asked Federal Bureau of Investigation to dispute Russian Federation reports

Which demands further investigation, particularly as it calls into question the ability of those agencies or the Republican majority Congress to investigate Trump’s Russian Federation ties.

Both Warner and Burr said earlier this month that the intelligence committee’s ongoing investigation into Russia’s role in the election must also probe the reported contacts between Trump’s campaign aides and Russian officials.

Senior administration officials told reporters Friday that McCabe initiated the conversation with Priebus after a White House meeting, telling him there was nothing to the reports.

Priebus then asked Comey if he can cite McCabe and Comey as “top intelligence officials” in pushing back on the story himself in TV interviews last Sunday, which he did.

In a background briefing, two senior Trump administration officials inveighed against a CNN report that the Federal Bureau of Investigation rejected a White House request to “publicly knock down” a story first reported by the New York Times.

The comment came during an intelligence meeting on February 15 that was unrelated to the Trump-Russia story. Did these White House efforts constitute obstruction of justice? The White House denied those stories.

“The FBI is totally unable to stop the national security “leakers” that have permeated our government for a long time“, Trump tweeted. McCabe gave his permission, the administration officials said.

The brazen attempt to interfere with an active investigation reminded some of President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, during which Nixon tried to use the Central Intelligence Agency to quash the FBI investigation of the Watergate burglary. Eisen is the head of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, or CREW, and on Friday called for the DOJ’s Office of the Inspector General to open up an investigation into the Priebus and McCabe communications. In fact, the two officials who revealed the Priebus-FBI contact and subsequent spin insisted on anonymity.

Democrats said Mr Priebus was in violation of a policy limiting communication between the White House and law enforcement on pending investigations.

The most senior Democrat on the committee, Adam Schiff, said if the White House indeed contrived to have intelligence officials contradict unfavourable news reports, it threatened the independence of the intelligence community.

The White House further insisted on Friday in a briefing with reporters that any discussion regarding the investigation into Russian Federation “didn’t occur, it never came up”.

Still, Trump and his advisers have denied having had contacts with Russian officials during the election.

The FBI has so far declined to comment on the story to ABC News.

Indeed, let’s not forget that Priebus himself, as recently as Sunday, publicly confirmed that the White House had spoken with the FBI leadership about some aspects of the investigation into the Russian Federation scandal. If then-Attorney General Loretta Lynch shouldn’t have had a brief social visit with the husband of Hillary Clinton, who was then a subject of an ongoing investigation, there surely shouldn’t be contact between the president’s chief of staff and FBI investigators about the substance of their work.