Priebus Reacts Farkas Intelligence Collection Remarks — ‘Just an Incredible Statement’

Thursday on Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, White House chief of staff Reince Priebus reacted to remarks made by Evelyn Farkas, formerly a deputy assistant secretary of defense under Obama, made on March 2’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”

She claimed a rush of intelligence gathering President-elect Donald Trump and his team prior to his swearing in.

Priebus called it an “incredible statement,” but reserved comment until he had an opportunity to “dig into it.”

Partial transcript as follows:

HEWITT: A news story came up last night, Mr. Priebus. Evelyn Farkas, former assistant deputy secretary of Defense a few days ago was on with Morning Joe, and talking to Mika about the end game during the Obama years. She said this, the 30-second clip.

(BEGIN AUDIO CLIP)

FARKAS: …that the Trump folks, if they found out how we knew what we knew about their, the staff, the Trump staff’s dealing with Russians, that they would try to compromise those sources and methods, meaning we would no longer have access to that intelligence. So I became very worried, because not enough was coming out into the open, and I knew that there was more….We have very good intelligence on Russia.

So then I had talked to some of my former colleagues, and I knew that they were trying to also help get information to the Hill.

(END AUDIO CLIP)

HEWITT: So Mr. Priebus, I put two clips together.

PRIEBUS: That’s incredible.

HEWITT: React to that for me, would you?

PRIEBUS: Well, I mean, I heard it late last night, so I mean I honestly, I talked to Sean a little bit about it late last night, Spicer, and then we’re going to be meeting on it this morning. It’s just an incredible statement, you know, and how, what it means and what she meant by that, and whether that has anything to do with the issues in regard to surveillance of Trump transition team members is something that we need to figure out this morning and throughout the day. But it certainly is an incredible comment, although I don’t want to add too much into it right now until I have an opportunity to sort of dig into it and figure out the scope of such a statement.

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