Team Trump Panics Over Bombshell Situation Room Tapes Leak
An administration source said they have “no idea” what might have been recorded.
Evan Vucci/REUTERS
President Donald Trump’s top aides suspect highly classified discussions in the Situation Room may have been secretly recorded.
An unnamed source in the administration told Axios that officials fear the audio recordings were handed over to New York Times reporters Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman for their forthcoming book on the inner workings of the Trump White House.
“We’re afraid some of our most sensitive conversations were being recorded,” the source told Axios, adding that they “have no idea which ones.”
The book will be released on June 23.
Simon & Schuster
If a recording device was used, it would constitute a significant breach of one of the world’s most secure settings, where such devices are strictly prohibited. At the same time, Trump has sought to quash critical reporting by invoking the threat of treason charges, and he instructed his acting attorney general to specifically target reporters at the receiving end of leaks last month.
The White House has already been caught off guard by the publication of certain excerpts from the book, titled Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump and due out on June 23. Passages from the book released by The New York Times appear to include verbatim quotes from the meetings.
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The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
One of the released excerpts describes a meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, during which potential strikes on Iran were discussed. Seating arrangements and reactions from the Feb. 11 meeting are closely noted, along with Trump’s reported response when Netanyahu presented a plan for regime change in Iran, saying, “sounds good to me.”
Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's meeting on Iran is featured in the upcoming book.
Jonathan Ernst/Reuters
A meeting held the following day, during which officials were briefed, also includes a quote from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who echoed the CIA director John Ratcliffe’s description of the Israeli prime minister’s regime-change scenarios as “farcical.”
“In other words, it’s bulls--t,” Rubio is reported as saying.
Another excerpt concerns the Epstein files, a highly sensitive issue for the president, who was once friends with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Haberman and Swan reported on officials gathering in the Situation Room, where Vice President JD Vance described the files as “a huge problem” and urged their release. Officials also discussed the possibility of pardoning convicted sex trafficker and Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, with communications director Steven Cheung calling it a “huge P.R. problem.”
The Situation Room of the White House in 2011. The high-security room was where officials received an update on the mission against Osama bin Laden.
Pete Souza/The White House via Getty Images
According to the authors of Regime Change, the book is based on more than 1,000 interviews with people close to Trump, including officials, and, as Axios notes, the detailed accounts of meetings are more likely to have come from insiders who participated than from any recording device.
Haberman and Swan declined to comment for this story. A New York Times spokesperson referred the Daily Beast to an authors’ note added to the book excerpt published last week, which states: “When we use direct quotes, those quotes came either from the person speaking, from someone who heard that person directly or from contemporaneous notes, recordings or transcripts.”
The White House has not disputed the quotes in Regime Change attributed to official meetings, and Trump, 80, is reportedly furious about what has been released.
Concerns over a potential leak have only revived criticism of the Trump administration’s at times lax security precautions, however.
In March last year, top U.S. officials mistakenly texted war plans to one of the president’s most-hated journalists, Jeffrey Goldberg, along with highly sensitive national security information. The details were not exposed by reporters writing a book, but by the officials themselves.
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