WASHINGTON: The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has rejected a recent White House request to ‘knock down’ media reports about communications between Trump aides and Russian intelligence agents during the 2016 election campaign, the US media reported on Friday.

Annoyed by the latest leak, President Donald Trump once again attacked the country’s intelligence agencies for feeding stories about him and his administration to the media.

“The FBI is totally unable to stop the national security ‘leakers’ that have permeated our government for a long time,” he tweeted on Friday.

The president said officials “can’t even find the leakers within the FBI itself. Classified information is being given to media that could have a devastating effect on US. FIND NOW.”

Request said to be violation of procedures that limit communications with bureau on pending investigations

CNN reported that at a recent meeting, White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus asked a senior FBI official if he could “publicly knock down” reports of these Russian contacts. The FBI official said he could not.

Later, a White House official told reporters they only made the request after the FBI indicated that the media reporting was inaccurate, ABC News reported.

CNN, however, insisted that “multiple US officials” were still confirming reports of frequent contacts between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence agents. But White House spokesman Sean Spicer said the CNN report was also inaccurate.

“We didn’t try to knock the story down. We asked them to tell the truth,” Mr Spicer said on Thursday night after CNN reported the White House’s request to the FBI.

At a background briefing, senior administration officials told reporters that on Feb 15 FBI assistant director Andrew McCabe went to the White House to attend an intelligence meeting. And at one stage, he told Mr Priebus, who was chairing the meeting, he believed a recent New York Times report that the FBI was investigating contacts between Trump campaign people and the Russian intelligence was a “BS”.

Mr Priebus asked “what can we do about this?” Mr McCabe promised to get back to him.

Later, Mr McCabe called from his office and told Mr Preibus the FBI could not say anything on the subject. “We’d love to help but we can’t get into the position of making statements on every story,” he reportedly said.

Mr Preibus asked if he could cite “senior intelligence officials” as saying there was nothing to the NYT story. Mr McCabe said he could.

But soon after that, FBI director James Comey called Mr Preibus and told him that he too believed the NYT story was wrong but the FBI could not contradict it.

When reporters asked one of the briefers if any US agency was investigating the alleged contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia, the official said his impression was “no”, but couldn’t say for sure.

The US media, while commenting on the briefing said that direct communications between the White House and the FBI were unusual because of decade-old restrictions on such contacts. Such a request from the White House was a violation of procedures that limited communications with the FBI on pending investigations, the reports claimed.

The issue also echoed on Capitol Hill where Democrats ripped the Trump administration over its alleged attempt to influence a federal investigation. Democratic lawmakers, and a growing number of Republicans, have called for a Congressional investigation into these charges and many are asking for Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a major supporter of Trump during the campaign, to recuse himself from the probe.

Published in Dawn, February 25th, 2017