The White House has spent the last several days doing it everything it can to debunk the stunningly embarrassing revelations contained in Michael Wolff’s insider teardown of the Trump administration, “Fire And Fury: Inside The Trump White House.” Despite author Wolff’s claims that he was invited into the White House by the administration to write his book and the obvious free access Wolff had in interviewing his cooperative subjects, the President himself felt compelled to tweet that he never authorized the conversations.
I authorized Zero access to White House (actually turned him down many times) for author of phony book! I never spoke to him for book. Full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist. Look at this guy’s past and watch what happens to him and Sloppy Steve!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 5, 2018
Trump has also sent his PR minions out to the “fake news” media that he loves to bash so much to do a hatchet job on the book and its author, with Senior Advisor Stephen Miller imploding on CNN yesterday in a vicious verbal exchange with anchor Jake Tapper that ended with Miller escorted out of the CNN studios.
Another Trumpian surrogate did even more poorly in attacking the credibility of the book’s portrait of extreme dysfunction and incompetence in the White House today, as former deputy presidential advisor Sebastian Gorka tried to demolish its believability in an op-ed article on The Hill.
In vaingloriously explaining how he himself was smart enough to recognize Wolff as “a partisan self-promoter with credibility issues the likes of which we haven’t seen in a very long time,” Gorka inadvertently contradicts the President’s claim of non-cooperation with the author and confirms Wolff’s own account that the White House staff was urged to speak freely with him.
After stating that he doesn’t trust journalists he doesn’t already know and proclaiming that he doesn’t do off-the-record “deep background” conversations, Gorka says this:
“So, when I met Michael Wolff in Reince Priebus’ office, where he was waiting to talk to Steve Bannon, and after I had been told to also speak to him for his book, my attitude was polite but firm: “Thanks but no thanks.” Our brief encounter reinforced my gut feeling that this oleaginous scribe had no interest in being fair and unbiased.”
As the bold section of this quotation clearly admits, Gorka, in all his self-righteous journalist bashing, was told to speak to Wolff, presumably by someone of higher authority within the administration. While it may not have been Trump himself, certainly it completely disproves the notion that Wolff somehow managed to sneak into the White House uninvited where no one noticed him scribbling in his notebook and demolishes the assertions in Trump’s tweet on the issue.
If the Trump staffers in the administration were indeed told to cooperate with the book’s author, it’s credibility becomes significantly harder to attack. Gorka’s foolish attempt to make himself look better than his former colleagues wound up digging the President into a deeper hole and undermined his devious defense with an inconvenient truth.
