White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer defended the Trump administration on Monday from accusations that they were trying to get the FBI to publicly discredit media reports about a collusion between Trump campaign associates and Russians during the 2016 campaign.
ABC News' Chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Karl asked Spicer whether he directly contacted Central Intelligence Agency director Mike Pompeo asking him to knock down media reports regarding campaign officials and Russia.
"As I mentioned, I think a week ago the New York Times published a story about what they called contacts between members of the Trump campaign and Russia officials," Spicer said. "The FBI deputy director was at a meeting here at the White House that morning. After the meeting concluded, he asked Chief of Staff to stand back a second. He wanted to tell him that the report in the New York Times was 'B.S.'"
"For viewers at home, I think you can pretty much figure out what that means, but I'll leave it that," Spicer added.
Spicer then reflected on White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus asking FBI's deputy director Andrew McCabe about the FBI publicly knocking down the reports.
After McCabe and Priebus had a back and forth discussing the appropriate way to handle the reports, and they "finally came to the conclusion that [the FBI] did not want to get in the process of knocking down every story that they had issues with."
Spicer followed that up by mentioning Rep. Devin Nunes (R., Calif.), the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, and reiterating his comments from Monday morning.
"He was very clear, number one, that he reached out to us to say I have been telling reporters that these allegations and descriptions in the New York Times are not accurate and then we shared that information with him," Spicer said. "He came to us to share that he equally had that issue brought up to him. He was briefed and saw 'no evidence' that the story was accurate."