President Trump questioned Bob Woodward’s credibility Tuesday after bombshell excerpts from the veteran journalist’s forthcoming book were published.
“It’s just another bad book. He’s had a lot of credibility problems,” Trump told the Daily Caller of the esteemed reporter. “I probably would have preferred to speak to him, but maybe not. I think it probably wouldn’t have made a difference in the book. He wanted to write the book a certain way.”
Trump’s comments follow the Washington Post releasing the audio recording of a telephone call between Woodward and the president, in which Trump praises the journalist of Watergate fame for “always being fair” but complains that he wasn’t given an opportunity to contribute to the text. Woodward can be heard pushing back on Trump’s allegation that he was never approached for an interview, saying he asked “about six people” to help arrange a conversation between the pair.
In snippets of the book, Fear: Trump in the White House, published by the Washington Post and others Tuesday, administration officials like White House chief of staff John Kelly and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis are quoted making disparaging remarks about the president’s mental acumen.
[Related: Trump once mocked Obama administration for attacking Bob Woodward]
“It’s just nasty stuff,” Trump continued to the Daily Caller. “I never spoke to him. Maybe I wasn’t given messages that he called. I probably would have spoken to him if he’d called, if he’d gotten through. For some reason I didn’t get messages on it.”
Trump also denied Woodward’s anecdote that former National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn once stole a document from the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office to stop the president from exiting a trade deal with South Korea. Trump condemned the claim as being “false” and “made up.”
“There was nobody taking anything from me,” he added.
White House press secretary Sarah Sanders on Tuesday additionally dismissed Woodward’s book as “nothing more than fabricated stories, many by former disgruntled employees, told to make the President look bad.”
Woodward covered the Watergate scandal with Carl Bernstein in the 1970s while the duo were both working for the Washington Post. Their reporting contributed to the eventual resignation of former President Richard Nixon amid the controversy.
Woodward and Bernstein’s editor at the time, Ben Bradlee, said in an 1990 interview unearthed in 2012 that he had a “residual fear in my soul” about whether Woodward had embellished some details surrounding his reporting on the Watergate issue. Shortly after the interview was widely circulated, Woodward pointed to more recent comments from Bradlee expressing his support for the journalist.
