Free Republic

RUSH: The big controversy today… I first got wind of this last night. There’s a headline out there CNN has an “exclusive.” This is not quite fake news, but it’s almost as bad. “FBI Refused White House Request to Knock Down Recent Trump-Russia Stories.” Now, first let me tell you what “the Trump-Russia stories” are. There are three of them. The first from the New York Times last October, in which nameless sources told the New York Times that agents of the Trump campaign were in contact with Russia during the campaign and discussing ways to sabotage the Hillary campaign....

Last fall, Donald Trump did not lash out at the FBI when James Comey decided to reopen the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s emails mere weeks before the election. However, he’s terribly angry about a Thursday CNN report about how the FBI refused to bury Russia stories that did not present a good look for his administration (following a request from White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus). Even worse (in Trump’s eyes), the story about this refusal came from his least favorite cable news network, which Trump regularly accuses of being “fake news.” The story itself was a leak, which...

The FBI shot down a recent request from the White House to publicly blast media reports about the alleged communications between President Trump’s associates and the Russians during the 2016 campaign, a report says. Multiple US officials who’ve been briefed on the matter told CNN that White House officials had been asking the bureau to say the stories were wrong, and that there had been no contacts between the two parties whatsoever — but they refused. The communications between the Trump administration and the FBI are said to be a direct violation of government procedures, which bar contact during ongoing...

White House chief of staff Reince Priebus asked a top FBI official to dispute media reports that President Trump's campaign advisers were in frequent touch with Russian intelligence agents during the election, a White House official told the Associated Press late Thursday.

A former spokesman for the Department of Justice says that White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus must resign in the wake of revelations that he had called the FBI to ask them to publicly deny a story about the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russian intelligence officials. Appearing on Chris Hayes’s show on MSNBC, ex-DOJ spokesman Matthew Miller said that anyone in the Obama administration would have been fired instantly for doing anything close to what Priebus did.