The White House was briefed in advance about a baseless Fox News report claiming murdered Democratic National Committee staffer Seth Rich provided documents to WikiLeaks, according to a new lawsuit that also alleges President Donald Trump encouraged the articles publication.

Rod Wheeler, an ex-police detective, private investigator and paid Fox News commentator, made the allegations in a suit filed against the network, parent company 21st Century Fox, Fox News reporter Malia Zimmerman and Trump supporter Ed Butowsky.

In the lawsuit, first reported by NPR , Wheeler alleged that Zimmerman fabricated quotes as she and Butowsky worked to advance a political agenda for the Trump administration.

Wheeler, who said he was approached by Butowsky in February and later retained by the Rich family to investigate the murder, alleged that he never told Zimmerman he found evidence of an email exchange between Rich and WikiLeaks or that powerful entities were impeding the police investigation into the young staffers death in July 2016.

The erroneous claims about communications between Rich and WikiLeaks first surfaced on May 15, when a Fox affiliate in Washington, D.C., ran a report. The quotes also appeared the next day in Zimmermans since-retracted article on Fox News website.

On Tuesday afternoon, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said Trump had no knowledge of this story and that it was completely untrue that the White House was involved in it.

Sanders acknowledged that her predecessor, Sean Spicer, met with Wheeler and Butowsky prior to publication, but dismissed the significance of the White House discussion. (Spicer indicated he was not aware of the Rich story when asked about it on May 16.) The press secretary also said she was not sure if Trump believed that Rich was WikiLeaks source the crux of Fox News retracted story.

The U.S. intelligence community has concluded that Russian hackers stole documents from the DNC, but many Trump supporters have pushed the bogus conspiracy theory about Rich to distract from investigations into whether Trump allies colluded with Russia during the 2016 campaign.

The accusation that FoxNews.com published Malia Zimmermans story to help detract from coverage of the Russia collusion issue is completely erroneous, Jay Wallace, president of news for Fox News, said in a statement. The retraction of this story is still being investigated internally and we have no evidence that Rod Wheeler was misquoted by Zimmerman.