President Trump’s administration is spending a lot of time fighting off stories they say are either false or misleading and it’s distracting their work, Trump’s chief of staff said Friday.
Reince Priebus told Fox News he’s spending half of his day shooting down stories, something that’s distracting him and others in the White House from advancing the president’s policies.
“When you have to spend half your day putting out phony stories, that becomes a distraction,” he said.
He mentioned a couple specific stories that were particularly distracting this week, including a Wall Street Journal report that the intelligence officials are withholding information from Trump, and a New York Times story alleging four members of Trump’s campaign had constant contacts with Russian intelligence during the run-up to the election.
Priebus said top members of the intelligence community have told him that both stories are “grossly overstated” and “inaccurate.”
“It’s totally fake, it’s totally false,” Priebus said.
Priebus raised the possibility that reporters are simply making up stories about the president but said nobody in the White House knows where the stories are coming from.
“They might be making them up,” he said. “There might be some bad actors in the intelligence community or some hold overs, nobody knows.”
