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Veteran journalist Bob Woodward said a “key” official in the Trump administration privately told him that the details in his books are “1000 percent true,” but later publicly defamed him. Woodward was interviewed on The New York Time’s podcast, “The Daily,” on Tuesday — the day his book “Fear: Trump in the White House” was officially released. Woodward told reporter Michael Schmidt that after excerpts of his book began circulating last week, someone working for the administration called him to praise the accuracy of his book. “After the information in ‘Fear’ started breaking last week, one key person who’s in...

This past week I asked a friend at the White House about how the president was holding up against the onslaught of media attacks. "They didn't even deliver a glancing blow," was the response. It wasn't for a lack of trying. Has any president in modern times been the target of such a Blitzkrieg of orchestrated assaults -- from John McCain's funeral turned anti-Trump scrum to Bob Woodward's discredited new book trashing the president to the media infatuation with the anonymous New York Times op-ed by a disgruntled federal employee who hates President Trump. Here we go again. Trump is...

When Nikki Haley’s name was floated as one of the people most likely to have written the NY Times op-ed my immediate reaction was ‘I don’t think so.’ To me, doing something like this would go against Haley’s entire brand which is to be bold and call people out when they are wrong, whether that’s Russia or Iran or some sleazy author hawking a book. It was just hard for me to imagine her resorting to an anonymous attack. Today, Haley has written a piece for the Washington Post calling out the author of the anonymous op-ed. Haley has a...

The White House on Monday labeled Bob Woodward "reckless" and "careless" after some administration officials refuted claims attributed to them in his new book "Fear: Trump in the White House," ratcheting up its war of words with the Watergate reporter. White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders also didn't rule out a lawsuit against Woodward. "A number of people have come out and said Woodward never even reached out to corroborate statements attributed to them, which seems incredibly reckless for a book to make such outrageous claims to not even take the time to get a $10 fact-checker to call...

Veteran journalist Bob Woodward said Monday in an exclusive interview on NBC News' "Today" that President Donald Trump is "detached from reality" and jeopardizes American national security. "I've never seen instance when the president is so detached from the reality of what's going on," Woodward said.

Longtime journalist Bob Woodward said Monday that Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and White House Chief of Staff John Kelly “are not telling the truth” when they deny making disparaging statements about President Donald Trump attributed to them in his new book, “Fear.” Kelly is quoted calling Trump “an idiot,” and Mattis is quoted saying Trump has the understanding of “a fifth or sixth-grader,” but they’ve said they didn’t make those statements. Woodward, asked on Monday on NBC’s “Today” show about their denials, said, “They are not telling the truth.” He said “these are political statements to protect their jobs.” The...

President Trump ratcheted up his attacks on famed Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward on Monday just 24 hours before his book 'Fear' goes on sale. 'The Woodward book is a Joke - just another assault against me, in a barrage of assaults, using now disproven unnamed and anonymous sources,' he wrote on Twitter. 'Many have already come forward to say the quotes by them, like the book, are fiction,' he claimed. And in a signal that he plans to be an aggressive counter-puncher in advance of the November midterm elections, he jabbed his liberal opponents – suggesting Woodward is among...

A bombshell newspaper essay which detailed efforts to sideline Donald Trump from government was “just an obvious attempt to distract attention from this booming economy and [the president’s] record of success”, Vice-President Mike Pence has said. Speaking to CBS’s Face the Nation in an interview for broadcast on Sunday, Pence also denied that White House officials discussed invoking the 25th amendment and removing Trump from power. The comment piece was published by the New York Times on Wednesday, under the title I Am Part of the Resistance Inside the Trump Administration and attributed to a mystery “senior official”. It came...

Chris Wallace says that the Woodward Book, the anonymous NYT op-ed, and Obama’s fiery speech were a “1-2-3 Punch” combination on Trump this week. But the word is that President Trump may be about to launch a devastating counterattack. It certainly looks that way. The word is that the White House legal team is examining the original FISA Court application and renewal applications for the warrant to surveil Carter Page. As President Trump considers declassifying the 20 pages of these documents that were released completely (or heavily) redacted this summer, as many in Congress have requested, the White House wants...

Media bias seems to get worse by the week. Even a work week shortened by Labor Day delivered on that depressing trend. Journalists cheered protests at the Supreme Court nomination hearing for Judge Brett Kavanaugh and swallowed a silly Internet hoax. Then there was the anonymous New York Times op-ed defending a “steady state” rebellion against President Trump. It was a new low for journalists devoted to overturning a democratic election. Call it the pièce de résistance. The New York Times trumped opposition leaders at CNN and The Washington Post. The three battle daily for liberal attention and journalistic kudos...

Donald Trump had to be tricked out of killing a U.S.-South Korean trade deal? He threatened to move a U.S. missile defense system from South Korea to Oregon? He ordered a plan for a pre-emptive attack on North Korea? These supposed moves by Trump, detailed in journalist Bob Woodward's new book, will cause bafflement and worry among government officials in Seoul. But, for many South Koreans, they just add more pieces of evidence to an established picture of an erratic U.S. leader who thinks little of an alliance forged in the turmoil of the Korean War and often described here...

Under the unusual circumstances surrounding his selection, Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh should have agreed to recuse himself from deciding cases involving the investigation of President Trump. The reason Kavanaugh asserted at his confirmation hearing for refusing to make such a pledge — that it would violate the imperative of judicial independence — is entirely unconvincing. In turn, senators should decline to approve Kavanaugh’s nomination unless he does so. And, since that’s not likely to happen, in the event that a case involving the Trump investigation were to come before a Justice Kavanaugh, he should not participate — for his...

I love Lindsay Graham. The witty South Carolina senator, who's usually more entertaining than most comedians, has been one of the highlights of the otherwise depressing televised Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Judge Brett Kavanaugh. Graham put it perfectly Thursday morning. He said some people had been coming up to him and asking if this week's ugly display of disruptions, rude moronic outbursts from the gallery and Democrat grandstanding had become a circus. "I'm here to defend circuses," Graham said, pointing out that it was safe for parents to take their kids to the circus but not to...

President Trump on Friday described his 2016 presidential election as Hillary Clinton's funeral. "I call it Hillary Clinton’s funeral, that was the night she lost the election," Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One. "It was a funeral, it was a wake." Trump made the remark while speaking about special counsel Robert Mueller's investigation into Russian election interference. The president has repeatedly attacked the probe as a "witch hunt" and blasted lawyers in the special counsel's office as "17 angry Democrats." Mueller is himself a longtime Republican, previously serving as FBI director under presidents of both parties. Trump on Friday...

Officials from the Trump administration reportedly contacted a Yale University psychiatrist last year because President Trump was "scaring" them. Dr. Bandy Lee told Salon and the New York Daily News on Thursday that two White House officials flagged Trump's behavior last October. "[They] said that Trump was 'scaring' them, that he was 'unraveling,'" Lee, who wrote the book "The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health Experts Assess a President,” told Salon. ADVERTISEMENT "Not wishing to confuse the role I chose, as an educator of the public, and a potential treatment role, I referred them to the...

Veteran journalist Carl Bernstein on Thursday called for Congress to hold hearings on President Trump's fitness for office. "What we need here are, finally, I think, some hearings in which an executive session or open session, those around the president of the United States are questioned about the fitness of Trump to be the president of the United States," Bernstein, a CNN political analyst, said on the network. Bernstein justified his call by citing excerpts from former reporting partner Bob Woodward's new book and an op-ed from an anonymous senior Trump administration official who argued that the president's actions are...

“We’re doing a great job,” said President Trump yesterday in a surprise endorsement of his own success. “The poll numbers are through the roof. Our poll numbers are great. And guess what? Nobody is going to come close to beating me in 2020 because of what we’ve done.” Though Trump can always be counted on to testify to his unblemished record of winning, it was odd he chose to focus on poll numbers right at the moment, because one place they are not going is “through the roof.” In fact, Trump’s numbers are dropping to near the lowest point of...

President Trump claimed this week that he had never used the word “retarded” to describe Attorney General Jeff Sessions — or anyone else — in an attempt to rebut one of the details included in the forthcoming Bob Woodward book that paints a harrowing portrait of his presidency. Since then, video and transcripts have surfaced proving the president wrong. Trump’s claim about Sessions came in a Tuesday tweet, in which he wrote: “The already discredited Woodward book, so many lies and phony sources, has me calling Jeff Sessions ‘mentally retarded’ and ‘a dumb southerner.’ I said NEITHER, never used those...

On NBC’s Thursday morning broadcast of the “Today” show, former CIA director John Brennan repeatedly praised the unknown author of the New York Times’s recent anti-Trump op-ed as a supreme example of “courageous” American patriotism. While admitting that the anonymous writer was committing “active insubordination” with the piece, Brennan justified his or her actions by claiming that because Trump is too “unfit” to be President, the writer is admirably trying to “prevent disasters” in the future. “I think there are two major takeaways,” Brennan told “Today” co-host Savannah Guthrie in relation to the op-ed. “One is, what the author...

One thing that sticks out to me reading the anonymous editorial in the New York Times is that it doesn't sound like a government official wrote it. The big "tell" is the use of the term "senior officials" in one form or similar at three points in the body of the editorial. Do regular people write like that? Not really but you know who does? Reporters. Think about it. How often do you see reporters using the term "senior officials" when writing on background? It is fairly frequent. In contrast how often do high level officials in the government refer...