Bob Woodward Says 'Key' Trump Official Told Him New Book Is '1,000-Percent Correct'
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Politics
Bob Woodward Says 'Key' Trump Official Told Him New Book Is '1,000-Percent Correct'
Hayley Miller, HuffPost 18 hours ago
Veteran reporter Bob Woodward said a top Trump administration official calledVeteran reporter Bob Woodward said a top Trump administration official called him last week and told him that his new tell-all book on the Trump presidency is “1,000-percent correct.”
Woodward, in an interview that aired Tuesday on The New York Times’ “The Daily” podcast, continued to reject President Donald Trump ’s claims that Fear: Trump in the White House is full of “lies and phony sources.”
“One key person who’s in office called me and said, ‘Everyone knows what you said here is true. It’s 1,000-percent correct.’ And then this person has said some public things that contradict that,” Woodward, who did not name the official, told the Times’ Michael S. Schmidt.
Fear , which hit bookstores on Tuesday, paints a harrowing picture of the chaos within the White House, and tells how senior Trump administration officials attempt to rein in the president’s worst impulses.
Woodward said Monday that several current and former Trump administration officials were “not telling the truth” when they denied quotes attributed to them in Fear , including White House chief of staff John Kelly and Defense Secretary James Mattis .
“These are political statements to protect their jobs ― totally understandable,” Woodward said of the denials on NBC’s “Today.” He said his book “is as carefully done as you can do an excavation of the reality of what goes on.”
In one particularly shocking passage, Woodward wrote that chief economic adviser Gary Cohn and White House staff secretary Rob Porter , before their ousters from the administration, stole documents off Trump’s desk in the Oval Office so he couldn’t sign them.
“They realized that [these documents] would endanger the country,” Woodward said. Cohn and Porter got away with it because Trump “doesn’t remember. If it’s not on his desk, if it’s not immediately available for action, it goes away.”
Cohn didn’t deny the eyebrow-raising anecdote in a statement to Axios on Tuesday.
“This book does not accurately portray my experience at the White House,” Cohn said in the statement. “I am proud of my service in the Trump Administration, and I continue to support the President and his economic agenda.”
Porter, in a statement to Axios, called Woodward’s book “misleading”:
Having now read Bob Woodward’s Fear, I am struck by the selective and often misleading portrait it paints of the President and his administration.
As Staff Secretary, I was responsible for managing the flow of documents to and from the Oval Office and ensuring that anything the President was asked to sign had been properly vetted. The suggestion that materials were “stolen” from the President’s desk to prevent his signature misunderstands how the White House document review process works — and has worked for at least the last eight administrations.
It was also my responsibility to help ensure that relevant viewpoints were considered, that pros and cons were evaluated, that policy proposals were thoroughly vetted, and that the President could make decisions based on full information. Fulfilling this responsibility does not make someone part of a “resistance” or mean they are seeking to “thwart” the President’s agenda. Quite the opposite.
President Trump invites robust discussion and asks probing questions. He has the confidence to allow advisors to disagree with a proposed course of action and advocate for an alternative outcome—and I sometimes did just that. But in the end, President Trump is the one who decides, and he has shown himself more than capable of doing so.
During my time in the White House, I sought to serve the President’s best interests and to help enable his many successes—successes that Mr. Woodward’s book ignores.
President Trump’s accomplishments are undeniable: significant tax relief to spur economic growth, rolling back burdensome regulations to unleash job creators, remaking the federal judiciary to uphold the Constitution, and much more.
This article has been updated to include Porter’s statement.
- This article originally appeared on HuffPost .
Tags
Who is online
119 visitors
I read a review of this book that was in Vox yesterday. The writer goes into great detail about what is in the book, and one of the points/observations the Vox writer makes is that there are the following people who are at the center of the revelations about the Trump white house. Rob Porter, Gary Cohn, Steve Bannon, Reince Priebus, Lindsey Graham, and John Dowd.
Seeing that, it is interesting that neither Cohn or Porter deny telling Woodward what is attributed to them in the book. Porter says the book is "misleading". He doesnt say the events depicted in the book didnt happen. "Misleading" is an interpretation. But even if you allow that Woodward may have framed some story in an unflattering way to Trump that Cohn or Porter did not intend, there is so much evidence of dysfunction and chaos in Trump himself and in his white house that defending him requires his supporters to run around sticking fingers in the hundreds of holes in the white house dike.
Who should we trust? The most respected reliable journalist of our times or The Lying King of Vulgaria?
What should we believe? Mounting evidence before our eyes of Trump's malfeasance or Donald Trump?
I bet Bob sells a lot of books .....
He has been riding the Nixon thing a long long long time. And it wasn't that great of a thing.
Nixon resigned in disgrace, didn't he?
No president prior to him or after have ever tried to get dirt on their opponents. /s
Some have even gone to the point of using their FBI and DOJ.
And what has that do to with anything? Are you another one of those "they all did it, but Nixon just got caught"?
Yeah....my elders were all saying that bullshit 40 years ago
FYI...Nixon ordered the break-in. That's a burglary. A felony. Then he covered it up. Another felony.
Another fantasy book from the so-called journalist who has always been a CIA misinformation spook.
his books and his opinions belong with all the other propaganda fantasyland garbage
I'm sorry, but I can't accept your biased opinion about what is fiction or not when you regularly proclaim a book is non-fiction that says the earth was created in six days contrary to all evidence, describes a global flood contrary to all evidence, and even describes a talking snake and talking donkey. I'm sure your deep problem with facts and truth also allow you to imagine Trump as being good for America contrary to all evidence.
You are once again misrepresenting my views.
i have posted that it is not inconsistent to believe in a literal Genesis record while believing that the 6 days in the Hebrew doesn’t have to mean 24 hour days, nor does it mean that the flood covered the earth.
i believe the Book of Genesis in the original Hebrew accommodates a Earth that is approx 5 billion tears old and a localized flood for Noah