President Donald Trump, who said he definitely, “1,000 percent” doesn’t have a feud with the C.I.A. or F.B.I., just picked a fight with the intelligence community again. Less than 24 hours after CNN reported that the F.B.I. and its director, James Comey, struck down a White House request to publicly refute media reports about alleged communications between the Trump campaign and known Russian operatives, the president took to Twitter to deride the top law-enforcement agency for apparently leaking the story.

“The FBI is totally unable to stop national security ‘leakers’ that have permeated our government for a long time. They can’t even . . . find the leakers within the FBI itself. Classified information is being given to the media that could have a devastating effect on U.S. FIND NOW,” Trump wrote on Twitter early Friday morning in a series of tweets.

Tensions between the Trump administration and U.S. intelligence agencies have been building for weeks as the White House has struggled to stymie a steady flow of embarrassing leaks, from the F.B.I. and C.I.A., as well as the National Security Council and other White House officials. Eight days earlier, Trump had launched a similar Twitter tirade against “low-life leakers” after The New York Times and CNN both reported that multiple Trump campaign advisers and associates were allegedly in continual contact with Russian operatives during the election. The president’s latest source of grievance was another CNN report, published Thursday, that revealed White House chief of staff Reince Priebus had asked F.B.I. deputy director Andrew McCabe and, subsequently, Director Comey, to publicly repudiate last week’s Times and CNN reports. According to CNN, the F.B.I. refused the request because it would have violated longstanding protocols about communications between the White House the the Justice Department regarding ongoing investigations.

Late on Thursday night, the White House pushed back on the CNN report, but confirmed that Priebus did speak with the F.B.I. about the issue. “We didn’t try to knock the story down. We asked them to tell the truth,” White House press secretary Sean Spicer said, according to CNN. In a statement to Politico, Spicer offered a similar defense. “To be clear, it was the F.B.I. that contacted the White House to rebut the New York Times’s story,” Spicer said Thursday night. “We merely asked them to inform journalists of the same point that they were making to us.”

CNN paints a different picture. Citing an anonymous White House official, the news outlet reported that after the initial conversation between Priebus and McCabe at an unrelated meeting, Priebus reached out again to McCabe and Comey, asking the two law-enforcement officials to at least talk to reporters on background about the investigation into Trump’s Russia ties. But again, McCabe and Comey refused the request.

It was not the first time that Priebus had tried to extinguish the story. On Face the Nation last weekend, the former Republican National Committee chairman characterized the Times story as “complete garbage” and slammed the media for “this unnamed source stuff.” He also threw cold water on the reports on Fox News Sunday. “We have now all kinds of people looking into this,” Priebus said of the Times report. “I can assure you and I have been approved to say this—that the top levels of the intelligence community have assured me that that story is not only inaccurate, but it's grossly overstated and it was wrong. And there's nothing to it.”

Democrats and ethics experts were quick to condemn the White House’s attempt to use the F.B.I. to push back on the reports about Trump’s alleged ties to the Kremlin. Norm Eisen, who served as President Barack Obama’s ethics czar, characterized Priebus’s actions as “shocking” and “forbidden.” Former Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security official Juliette Kayyem said Priebus’s reported actions were “so desperate,” Politico reports, while Matthew Miller, another Justice Department alum, suggested that it “veers dangerously close to tampering with an investigation.”

Priebus’s reported actions have also invigorated calls for U.S. attorney general Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from the ongoing F.B.I. investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. “The need for an independent, bipartisan investigation into these matters has never been more clear,” John Conyers, a ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, told Politico. “The Trump team has clear ties to the Russian government—and we ignore those ties at our own peril.”

In a statement to CNN, a spokesperson for Sessions said that the Justice Department “is following the guidelines in its communications with the White House,” and is reviewing procedural memos that outline the limits of direct communications between presidential administrations and the F.B.I.