Michael Wolff couldn’t have asked for better publicity.
Michael Wolff couldn’t have asked for better publicity. His new book, Fire and Fury, doesn’t officially come out until January 9, but its salacious revelations about the infighting within the Trump campaign, transition, and administration dominated the political news cycle Wednesday, including the questions at the White House press briefing. Of particular focus in the briefing room were the comments from former campaign and White House adviser Steve Bannon, who disparaged the president’s family, said campaign officials acted treasonously, and suggested Trump himself knew about those treasonous activities.
Peter Alexander of NBC News asked press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders the questions bluntly: Did Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, “commit treason”? That’s how Bannon described to Wolff the younger Trump’s decision to broker a meeting at Trump Tower in June 2016 between members of the campaign, including Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort, and a Russian lawyer who claimed, through an intermediary, to have incriminating evidence about Hillary Clinton. Bannon also said Don Jr.’s actions were “unpatriotic” and that he should have alerted the FBI about the offer from the Russians. Read more... |
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What’s clear from the excerpts from Wolff’s book published so far is that the author had a great deal of access to people around Trump’s transition and administration. In an editor’s note at the end of the excerpt published by New Yorkmagazine, Wolff claims to have conducted more than 200 interviews after having taken up what he called a “semi-permanent seat on a couch in the West Wing.”
Sanders said Wednesday that Wolff had “just over a dozen interactions” with officials at the White House but that “close to 95 percent were all done so at the request” of Bannon. She also said the “only interaction” Trump has had with Wolff since taking office was a “brief conversation” on the phone. “He never actually sat down with the president, just to be very clear,” Sanders said.
Here’s my question, which would help demonstrate how much the White House participated in the book: How many of the interviews Wolff conducted at the White House were done so with a communications staffer in attendance? I’m told that at least one interview Wolff had with a White House official in the West Wing was conducted with such a staffer in tow. So far, the White House has not responded to my requests. |
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Photo of the Day
Sarah Huckabee Sanders at a White House press briefing on January 3, 2018. (Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images) |
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| On the President’s Schedule—Thursday is the busiest day of the new year for President Trump, who will meet with Republican senators twice to discuss “immigration” and “2018 legislative priorities,” according to the White House. Trump will also meet with Ronna Romney McDaniel, the chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, and will present the National Security Medal to Richard Ledgett Jr., formerly the deputy director of the National Security Agency. |
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Dissolved—A brief statement from the White House Wednesday night announced that the president’s commission on voter fraud is ending. “Despite substantial evidence of voter fraud, many states have refused to provide the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity with basic information relevant to its inquiry,” reads the statement. “Rather than engage in endless legal battles at taxpayer expense, today President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order to dissolve the Commission, and have asked the Department of Homeland Security to review these issues and determine next courses of action.”
The commission, which was created after a baseless claim by President Trump that he would have won the popular vote if not for 3 million to 5 million illegal votes, had Vice President Mike Pence as its chairman and Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach as its vice chairman.The complaint from the administration that states were withholding information important for the commission’s work was legitimate but, as I found last summer, mostly for naught. The majority of the voter data the commission sought from recalcitrant states was available for purchase from third-party companies who compile it for political campaigns. |
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| Mueller Watch—Paul Manafort is fighting back. The former Trump campaign chairman who was indicted by the special counsel led by Robert Mueller is suing. Here’s the New York Times:
President Trump’s former campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, sued the special counsel on Wednesday and asked a federal court to narrow his authority, escalating Republican efforts to discredit an investigation that has stretched longer than the White House expected.
The unusual move comes as Mr. Trump tries to portray the investigation as a politically motivated witch hunt that has cast a dark cloud over his administration and, in his view, the country.
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| Metaphor Alert?—From the Journal News in the Hudson River Valley: “A fire broke out today at a building on the Clintons' property in Chappaqua and was quickly extinguished.” |
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| I’m a Christopher Nolan fanboy, and I thought Dunkirk was certainly the best movie I saw last year. I really enjoyed both of these reimaginings of the film through creative editing. |
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