Spicer: FBI Told White House NYT Article Was ‘Not Accurate’

White House press secretary Sean Spicer pushed back on a New York Times report alleging the White House pressured FBI officials to refute a Russian-connection story during an interview Monday on “The Laura Ingraham Show.”

The Times published a story Feb. 23 claiming White House officials attempted to persuade the FBI to publicly refute an earlier article claiming President Donald Trump’s officials had “constant contact” with Russian officials during the election season. Spicer said The Times had the chronology backwards and that FBI officials approached the White House first.

“The irony of this is that we are trying to cast sunlight on the issue and say, ‘The story in The Times is not accurate.’ We were being told they didn’t believe us.”

“We were informed by the FBI. They came to us and said this story in The New York Times is not accurate,” Spicer told LifeZette Editor-in-Chief Laura Ingraham. “And we asked them, ‘Oh, that’s great. If the story is not accurate, could you let people know? We need to tell other journalists who are calling the White House that it’s not accurate.'”

“And so the FBI went back and forth with us all day and said, ‘We just don’t know if we should get into the business in commenting on every story’s accuracy,'” Spicer clarified.

Spicer noted that later that same day, Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), the House Intelligence Committee chairman, informed the White House that he, too, had been briefed about the earlier story’s inaccuracy.

“[Nunes]said, ‘I’ve been calling other reporters and I just want you guys to know that I know this isn’t accurate and this story in The Times — I’m trying to tell people that it’s not accurate,'” Spicer said.

But after The Times published the article Feb. 23 that called out the White House for its communication with the FBI, congressional Democrats immediately pounced on the narrative.

“The irony of this is that we are trying to cast sunlight on the issue and say, ‘The story in The Times is not accurate.’ We were being told they didn’t believe us,” Spicer told Ingraham.

As the media continually become distracted with any tenuous connections between Russia and the administration, Spicer urged them to partake in a bit of self-examination.

“Where is the substance of all of this chatter and all these rumors and all these unnamed sources?” Spicer said. “You can’t keep a secret in this town for more than six minutes. And after six months, we still have nothing. And my question is, it’s not a question of an investigation. It’s a question of what are we looking for?”

Noting that “we’ve been hearing about people looking into” the Russia saga “for a long time,” Spicer said the media still remain at “square one” because everyone keeps using unnamed sources to describe something that no one can actually confirm.

“This is a solution or a story in search of a problem that doesn’t seem to exist,” Spicer added. “They keep looking for something that isn’t there.”

The press secretary also addressed Trump’s ongoing and escalating feud with the mainstream media as a whole. In particular, Spicer responded to the media’s mass outcry when several major news networks — including The Times, CNN, and The Washington Post — were excluded from a press gaggle inside Spicer’s office Friday.

Spicer insisted that “context is important,” noting that if the president has already spoken publicly on a particular day, the White House press secretary often doesn’t hold a full-on press briefing. On Friday, Trump spoke to the Conservative Political Action Conference. Later in the day, Spicer held the infamous gaggle in his office.

“We expanded the pool. … We added some additional outlets, as well. And … because some other outlets weren’t part of it, that was somehow outrageous,” Spicer said, before noting that  “everything — the audio, the transcript — was made available to every member of the correspondents’ association” afterward.

“It’s interesting how the mainstream media rushes to defend, you know, the mainstream — but when’s the last time they cared about the Christian Broadcasting Network? EWTN? The Catholic Network? They routinely leave these individuals out and don’t mention, you know, their exclusion and don’t fight for them the same way that they do,” Spicer said.

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“When you look at our track record over the last, you know, 30 some odd days, we’ve actually brought more reporters into the process,” Spicer added. “We’ve been more transparent. We had the president available to them more than anyone can recall that I’ve talked to in the press corp.”

Spicer said the president’s main concern regarding the media is that more outlets can be involved in the process “to hear the president so that he could talk about his vision for America.”

“I think we actually have really shown an ability to reach out beyond what is traditional,” Spicer said.

As for the president’s statements calling “fake news” the “enemy of the American people,” Spicer reaffirmed that Trump only views the “fake news” as the enemy — not honest reporting.

“But I’ve said it before, Laura, these folks are not going to report on the actual facts or the reality of what’s happening,” Spicer said. “And we have an obligation, frankly, to make sure that the truth gets out.”