Maggie Haberman SCOOP: Trump Tried to Bully Officials Into Seizing Her Phone Records – And Out Her Sources
L: Spencer Platt/Getty Images
Former President Donald Trump tried to get officials in his administration to seize the phone records of New York Times correspondent and author Maggie Haberman in order to reveal her sources.
In yet another scoop from Haberman’s controversial but much-buzzed-about upcoming book Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, Haberman reveals that Trump targeted Haberman in his tantrums over White House leaks.
Reports Axios:
N.Y. Times reporter Maggie Haberman reports in her book — “Confidence Man,” out Tuesday — that former President Trump had threatened internally to go after her phone records to expose leakers.
“Trump, angry about my published stories, would bellow that he wanted administration officials to obtain my phone records and identify my sources,” Haberman writes.
“It did not appear that anyone ever acted on it.”
Why it matters: News organizations go to great lengths to prevent the government from seeing their communications, in part to protect the identity of sources who help expose what’s really going on.
Former Trump official Stephanie Grisham provided some corroboration in a new Politico profile:
“If we weren’t trying to track down who wrote the ‘Anonymous’ book,” former White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham told me, referring to the book titled A Warning by an administration official, “you were trying to track down who talks to Maggie Haberman.”
A Trump spokesperson gave Axios a boilerplate statement:
“While coastal elites obsess over boring books chock-full of anonymously-sourced mistruths, America is a nation in decline. President Trump is focused on Saving America, and there’s nothing the Fake News can do about it.”
Haberman’s book has become a lightning rod, with critics questioning her for holding back damaging and potentially criminal details for the tome instead of reporting them out immediately — or, in the case of Trumpworld, trying to wish it out of relevance.
In the political media world, the book has become the source of daily bombshells and bombshellettes of varying intensity. They include the fact that Trump disclosed to Haberman that he had taken sensitive documents from the White House long before that issue became the subject of a Justice Department investigation.
Haberman’s book comes out October 4 for those who are too tired to print out and tape together the dozens of excerpts that have been published thus far.
