Veteran media critic and author Howard Kurtz writes in his new book “Media Madness,” that FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe initiated a meeting last February with then-Chief of Staff Reince Priebus to relay he believed a New York Times piece alleging Trump campaign officials made contact numerous times with Russian intelligence officials was “bullsh*t.”
According to Kurtz, Priebus asked if the FBI could release a statement denying the report’s veracity. The former FBI Deputy Director said he would have to think about it, later telling Priebus that there was nothing he could do. Later, Comey called to relay the same message, instead offering to provide Senate Intelligence Committee investigators with evidence that would discredit the report.
“You’ll never guess what happened next,” writes The Federalist‘s Mollie Hemingway.
Now, a week later, CNN was airing a breaking news story naming Priebus. According to ‘multiple U.S. officials,’ the network said, ‘the FBI rejected a White House request to publicly knock down media reports about communications between Donald Trump’s associates and Russians known to U.S. intelligence.’
Priebus was stunned by the implication that he was pressuring law enforcement. Had he been set up? Why was the FBI leaking this information when one of its top officials had initiated the conversation?
CNN’s story was authored by Sciutto, Perez, Shimon Prokupecz, Manu Raju, and Brown. Raju is the reporter who later messed up a massive Russia-collusion story by not verifying underlying details in any serious way. He has not explained how he got the story wrong or done anything to regain credibility lost by running a blatantly false story.
The story is sourced to a “U.S. law enforcement official” who seems to know an awful lot about McCabe (e.g. “A law enforcement official says McCabe didn’t discuss aspects of the case but wouldn’t say exactly what McCabe told Priebus.”)
While Hemingway only strongly suggests McCabe leaked details of the meeting he initiated with Priebus to the press, the website’s co-founder, Sean Davis, appears certain the top FBI official set the whole ordeal up.
“McCabe told Priebus a big NYT story alleging treasonous collusion was false. Priebus asked if he could make that public. McCabe then leaked that Priebus was interfering with the FBI, tweeted Davis Monday.
As previously reported by Business Insider, then-Director James Comey testified to Senate Intelligence Committee last June that The New York Times piece was “not true.”
When asked by Senator Jim Risch (R-ID) whether the report was true or not, Comey replied, “In the main, it was not true. And again, all of you know this. Maybe the American people don’t. The challenge, and I’m not picking on reporters about writing stories about classified information, is the people talking about it often don’t really know what’s going on, and those of us who know what’s going on are not talking about it. And we don’t call the press to say, ‘hey, you got that thing wrong about the sensitive topic.’ We have to leave it there.”
Last week, the Daily Beast reported former FBI Director James Comey, bureau Deputy Director Andrew McCabe and Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein are officially named in the “shocking” FISA abuse memo.
According to the Washington Post, McCabe intends to resign from the FBI once he is eligible for full pension benefits in March.
