Vice President Mike Pence and White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus arrive in the East Room of the White House in Washington, Thursday, Feb. 16, for President Donald Trump's news conference. | AP Photo Priebus: Reports of Trump campaign-Russia contact 'exaggerated'

White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus held the party line on news coverage of President Donald Trump on Friday, dismissing reports about scrutiny into the Trump campaign’s relationship with Russia as exaggerated without saying, definitively, that none of the president’s associates contacted the country before the election.

In an interview with Fox News, Priebus echoed his boss in responding to a couple unflattering stories about the administration that ran this week. In a long-winded news-conference on Thursday, Trump complained that the news media is unfair to him and repeatedly referred to its aggressive coverage of his administration as “fake news.”


Priebus, speaking to Fox, described a Wall Street Journal story about some intelligence officials withholding information from the president as “totally fake” and “totally false”; the New York Times story reporting that some Trump campaign associates had repeated contact with Russia before the election, he asserted, is “also fake.”

Both publications have stood by the stories (in the Times’ case, CNN reported the same thing). When a Fox host noted that the newspapers were not making up the reports, and that they had to be getting the stories from somewhere, Priebus acknowledged that some government sources may be behind them — people he described as “some bad actors within the intelligence community or some holdovers, nobody knows.”

Priebus insisted, though, that he had spoken with high-level intelligence officials who told him that the Times story about the campaign contact with Russia was “grossly overstated and inaccurate.”

“I wouldn’t come on your show and say something like that if I didn't have a green light and approval to say it,” Priebus added.

Asked if he could say for sure that there were no contacts between the Trump campaign and Russia, Priebus couldn’t, instead offering, “I don’t represent the campaign,” before repeating that the reports are exaggerated.