Jonathan Swan Asked Straight Up If New Book Uncovered ‘Anything Illegal Going On’ In the Trump Admin

Screenshot via C-SPAN

New York Times White House correspondents Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan spoke to C-SPAN’s Peter Slen for a lengthy Q&A about their new book, which is set to air on the network Monday night.

Haberman and Swan’s book, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” came out last week and became an instant best seller following weeks of details from the book being released in the media.

The deeply sourced book led to speculation that the two reporters obtained tapes of Situation Room meetings inside the Trump White House, which pulled back the curtain on the Trump administration’s scramble to contain the fallout from reporting tying President Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein last summer. Other details from the book grabbed headlines across the media and led to Slen asking Swan if anything the duo reported on appears to reach the level of criminality on Trump’s part.

“Is there something illegal going on, in your view, Jonathan Swan?” Slen asked.

“Well, it’s an interesting question, because Trump himself was granted sweeping immunity, as all presidents were, with the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling in 2024. So Trump is essentially beyond the reach of the law in terms of actions,” Swan replied, adding:

I mean, it hasn’t been tested, so we don’t exactly know what the boundaries of it are. But it’s hard to imagine something that he’s done so far that would defy the bounds of that ruling. We also have reporting in the book that Donald Trump has told senior advisors in the Oval Office that he is going to pardon anyone who came within 250 feet of the Oval Office.

He sometimes says 200 feet, sometimes he says 290 feet — some number of feet. So there’s a sense among Trump and his allies and his inner circle that, with a very friendly Justice Department run by Trump’s own former personal lawyer, with sweeping immunity from the Supreme Court, with an intention to use the pardon power more expansively, potentially, than any president has ever used it — I don’t think that they feel any real concern about illegality.

Watch the clip above via C-SPAN.

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