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.
“I think that is a ridiculous accusation and one that I’m pretty sure we’ve addressed many times from here before,” a stern-looking Sanders responded from the podium. “And if that’s in reference to comments made by Mr. Bannon, I’d refer you back to the ones that he made previously on 60 Minutes where he called the collusion with Russia about this president a total farce. So I think I would look back at that. If anybody has been inconsistent, it’s been him. It certainly hasn’t been the president or this administration.”
And what of Bannon’s claim that “the chance that Don Jr. did not walk these jumos up to his father’s office on the twenty-sixth floor is zero”? “Did the president meet any of Donald Trump, Jr.’s guests at that June 2016 Trump Tower meeting on that day?” Alexander asked.
“As the president has stated many times, no,” Sanders replied. “And he wasn’t part or aware of that.”
And so the briefing continued, with Sanders responding to questions in a way that echoed President Trump’s own statement responding to the numerous reports about the Wolff book. In that statement, Trump torched Bannon, saying that the former aide “has nothing to do with me or my Presidency.” When Bannon was fired from the White House, Trump went on, “he not only lost his job, he lost his mind.”
The decision by the White House to engage with Wolff’s book rather than completely dismiss it was an interesting one. Sanders did call the book “trashy tabloid fiction” on Wednesday and said it “has a lot of things … that are completely untrue.” She noted that some people have denied they said what Wolff quotes them saying. (It’s also not clear, NBC News’s Katy Tur points out, whether any or some of the quotations in the book are not direct source quotes but re-creations of conversations recounted by others.)
But Trump World has afforded none of that skepticism to Bannon, who the president, his White House, and his son have disowned for what he’s allegedly said. The questions Wolff’s book raises would be extremely difficult for the White House to dismiss anyway, but Trump seems to have welcomed the fight over it.
What’s clear from the excerpts from Wolff’s book published so far is great deal of access the author had to people around Trump’s transition and administration. In an editor’s note at the end of the excerpt published by New York magazine, 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 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, an answer for which would explain 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 in 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.
