Incoming White House Chief of Staff Reince Priebus on Wednesday said a report raising questions about President-elect Trump’s relationship with the Kremlin is just “offensive crap.”
Speaking on NBC, Priebus said the fact that BuzzFeed published an unverified 35-page document makes the website itself “not credible.” BuzzFeed published the document that’s reportedly been floating around the upper echelons of the U.S. government in order to let the American people decide what to believe.
Priebus said he has been in intelligence briefings with Trump and the report has never come up.
“(It’s) offensive crap that we shouldn’t even be talking about,” he said.
The report released Tuesday made public a long list of salacious accusations against Trump, ranging from collaboration with Russian intelligence in order to defeat Hillary Clinton in the presidential election to bizarre sex acts in Russian hotel rooms. It is unverified and the Trump camp has called it “fake news.”
The author of the report, riddled with errors and misspellings, is reportedly an ex-British intelligence officer who is considered a credible source of information by American intelligence officials. Priebus said the author is now just a political attack dog for hire and wasn’t an impartial source.
“This guy is a paid political operative. It’s not like this guy is a paid intelligence operative in the UK,” Priebus said.
Priebus disputed one of the most incendiary allegations in the report, that Trump’s lawyer Michael Cohen met with Russian intelligence agents in Prague in order to coordinate on a campaign to harm Clinton.
“If the thing is based on a meeting in Prague when the guy has never been to Prague in his life … it’s been reported he was in California,” Priebus said.
Priebus said Cohen’s passport showed no stamp showing that he had been to Prague — which would not be necessary if Cohen flew into another European Union country and then traveled to the Czech Republic, due to the freedom of travel provisions in the Schengen Zone. Still, Priebus said it’s just a political attack, not an intelligence report.
“It’s all phony baloney garbage,” he said.
