A lawyer representing Donald Trump is making moves toward stopping the publication of a new book about the White House which purports to show the chaos and dysfunction of the first year of Trump’s presidency and portrays the man himself as a big buffoon child who doesn’t know much about anything.
Michael Wolff‘s book Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House has been the talk of the town for the past couple of days, after an excerpt published in The Hollywood Reporter and The New Yorker extensively quoted Trump’s former muse Steve Bannon absolutely ripping on the president’s family, including calling his son Donald Jr “treasonous” and his daughter Ivanka “dumb as a brick”.
According to the New York Times, Trump spent most of yesterday “raging” about the book to officials and advisors. “He’s out of control,” one person with knowledge of Trump’s comments said.
Trump’s lawyer, Charles Harder, demanded on behalf of the president that Wolff and his publisher “cease and desist from any further publication, release or dissemination” of the forthcoming book. “We are investigating numerous false and/or baseless statements that you have made about Mr. Trump.”
The letter goes on to say that Trump’s legal team are looking into whether the book constitutes defamation of Trump, his family or his associates. A similar letter was sent to Bannon, demanding that he cease and desist from making allegedly false statements about Trump and his family.
Well, it hasn’t seemed to work, anyway. According to CNN, Harder’s book is now dropping tomorrow – four days earlier – amid the furore.
Breaking: @MichaelWolffNYC‘s “Fire and Fury” will now be released TOMORROW. Four days earlier than expected. Here’s our story https://t.co/Pcdx2mnVRl
— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) January 4, 2018
Much of he discourse over the past day has been about Wolff himself, who is frequently accused of being a fabulist who makes up quotes and interactions for his books and articles. This has given Trump supporters very solid ground against some of the books more lurid claims, but there has been some pushback.
https://twitter.com/janicemin/status/949005110671126528
According to Axios, Wolff has dozens of hours of interview recordings to back up his assertions in the book – including ones with Bannon and former White House deputy chief of staff Katie Walsh. Some of the recordings, Axios alleges, are of officials who thought they were talking off the record.
Anyway. We’ll leave it up to the factcheckers to determine just how much of Wolff’s book is accurate. One thing’s for certain: it’ll almost certainly cause a splash when it lands tomorrow.
