White House denies stacking CIA visit with Trump fans

White House press secretary Sean Spicer on Monday disputed reports that administration loyalists stacked President Trump’s Saturday meeting at the CIA to create the illusion of strong support within the agency.

When asked about the CBS report that said the administration flooded the room with 40 people who were loudly cheering the president, Spicer pushed back.

“I don’t think that’s accurate at all. If you listen to the audio, you can hear the excitement that exists there,” he said, referring to the administration’s presence there as a “very small footprint” of 10 people at most.

Reporters at the event noted that many members of the front row stood up to cheer Trump during the speech, while the senior leadership of the agency did not.

{mosads}But Spicer said everyone in the first row during the CIA speech was from the agency, dismissing the accusations that those who stood were planted by Trump’s team.

Intelligence sources told CBS that agency employees were “uncomfortable” with the cheers and that it “made relations with the intelligence community worse.”

Trump has had a rocky relationship with the intelligence community since his election. For months, he questioned the intelligence consensus that Russia was behind the hacks on the Democratic National Committee and other Democratic organizations, noting in a statement that “these are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.”

While Trump ultimately said he thinks Russia was behind the hacks, he further blasted the intelligence community for a leak about an unverified dossier of allegedly damaging information about him.

Spicer dismissed any talk of a rift between Trump and his intelligence agencies, adding that the president wanted to make it clear that what’s seen in the media — both allegations of a rift and reports downplaying the size of the crowd at his inauguration — isn’t accurate.

“I think he wanted them to know you see and hear all this stuff on TV about this rift that so-called exists, it doesn’t matter. Don’t believe what you are hearing,” he said.

“There is this constant theme to undercut the enormous support that he has, and it’s just unbelievably frustrating when you are told it’s not big enough; it’s not good enough. You can’t win.”