Trump is not convinced he should do anything about the bounty issue, which he decried in a Wednesday morning tweet as “just another made up by Fake News tale that is told only to damage me and the Republican Party.” One administration official said there is an internal White House dispute about how much information to declassify to support the president’s skepticism of the intelligence.

Some of Trump’s own senior intelligence officials viewed the information as credible enough to warn the Pentagon and allies so they could ensure they had measures in place to protect their forces in Afghanistan, and to begin developing options for responding to the Russian operation, national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien said Wednesday.

And though the administration has sought to downplay the veracity of the intelligence, O’Brien said the CIA has asked the Justice Department to open a leak investigation on the matter.