WOODWARD sends White House into damage control with new book.
The book quotes Kelly as having doubts about Trump’s mental faculties, declaring during one meeting, “We’re in Crazytown.” It also says he called Trump an “idiot,” an account that Kelly denied Tuesday.
WASHINGTON — An incendiary tell-all book by a reporter who helped take down President Richard Nixon set off a firestorm in the White House on Tuesday, with its descriptions of current and former aides criticizing President Donald Trump and disparaging his judgment.
The book by Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward is the latest to throw the Trump administration into damage-control mode with explosive anecdotes and concerns about the commander in chief.
Trump decried the quotes and stories in the book on Twitter as “frauds, a con on the public,” adding that Defense Secretary James Mattis and Chief of Staff John Kelly had denied uttering quoted criticisms of the president in the book.
The White House, in a statement from press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, dismissed the book as “nothing more than fabricated stories, many by former disgruntled employees, told to make the president look bad.”
Woodward did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The book quotes Kelly as having doubts about Trump’s mental faculties, declaring during one meeting, “We’re in Crazytown.” It also says he called Trump an “idiot,” an account that Kelly denied Tuesday.
“The idea I ever called the president an idiot is not true,” Kelly said in a statement distributed by the White House. “He always knows where I stand, and he and I both know this story is total B.S.”
The book says Trump’s former lawyer in the Russia probe, John Dowd, doubted the president’s ability to avoid perjuring himself should he be interviewed in special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian election interference and potential coordination with Trump’s campaign. Dowd, who stepped down in January, resigned after the mock interview, the book said.
“Don’t testify. It’s either that or an orange jumpsuit,” Dowd is quoted telling the president.
Dowd, in a statement Tuesday, said “no so-called ‘practice session’ or ‘re-enactment’” took place and denied saying Trump was likely to end up in an orange jumpsuit.
Mattis is quoted explaining to Trump why the U.S. maintains troops on the Korean Peninsula to monitor North Korea’s missile activities. “We’re doing this in order to prevent World War III,” Mattis said, according to the book.
The book recounts that Mattis told “close associates that the president acted like — and had the understanding of — ‘a fifth- or sixth-grader.’”
Mattis said in a statement: “The contemptuous words about the President attributed to me in Woodward’s book were never uttered by me or in my presence.”
A Pentagon spokesman, Col. Rob Manning, said Mattis was never interviewed by Woodward.
“Mr. Woodward never discussed or verified the alleged quotes included in his book with Secretary Mattis or anyone within the [Department of Defense],” he said.
Woodward reported that after Syria’s Bashar Assad launched a chemical weapons attack on civilians in April 2017, Trump called Mattis and said he wanted the Syrian leader taken out, saying, “Kill him! Let’s go in.” Mattis assured Trump that he would get right on it but then told a senior aide they’d do nothing of the kind, Woodward wrote. National security advisers instead developed options for the airstrike that Trump ultimately ordered.
U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley denied Tuesday that Trump had ever planned to assassinate Assad. She told reporters at U.N. headquarters that she had been privy to conversations about the Syrian chemical weapons attacks, “and I have not once ever heard the president talk about assassinating Assad.”
Woodward also claims that Gary Cohn, the former director of the National Economic Council, boasted of removing papers from the president’s desk to prevent Trump from signing them into law, including efforts to withdraw from the North American Free Trade Agreement and from a deal with South Korea.
Trump denied that Cohn took papers from his desk in the Daily Caller interview. “That’s false,” Trump said. “It’s just made up.”
The book follows the January release of author Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, which led to a rift between Trump and Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist, who spoke with Wolff in terms that were highly critical of the president and his family. Wolff’s book attracted attention with its vivid anecdotes but had numerous factual inaccuracies.
Information for this article was contributed by Catherine Lucey and Eric Tucker of The Associated Press; and by Justin Sink, Shawn Donnan, Jennifer Epstein and Shannon Pettypiece of Bloomberg News.