Michael Wolff, the author of the seedy and fact-challenged anti-Trump tell-all, Fire and Fury, is back with another seedy and fact-challenged anti-Trump tell-all which will hit bookstores on June 4, 2019.
Even before its publication date, a key assertion in Wolff’s latest offering, Siege: Trump Under Fire, has already been debunked.
The Guardian, which received an advance copy of the book, fact-checked one of its “stunning revelations” and found it to be less than accurate, or to be precise — totally made up.
According to the British paper, Wolff claims in his book that Special Counsel Robert Mueller drew up a three-count obstruction of justice indictment against President Trump and decided to shelve it after it sat on his desk for a full year. The draft indictment, in Wolff’s telling, charged Trump with “obstructing an investigation, tampering with a witness, and retaliating against a witness.”
In an author’s note, Wolff states that his findings on the Mueller investigation are “based on internal documents given to me by sources close to the Office of the Special Counsel”.
But Peter Carr, a spokesman for Mueller, told the Guardian: “The documents that you’ve described do not exist.”
This vignette is the most significant part of Wolff’s new book, according to the Guardian–and it appears to be a fabrication.
The book also includes a quote from the president that is sure to be hyped by the media:
According to Wolff, Mueller endured tortured deliberations over whether to charge the president, and even more tortured deliberations over the president’s power to dismiss him or his boss, the then deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein. Mueller ultimately demurred, Wolff writes, but his team’s work gave rise to as many as 13 other investigations that led to cooperating witness plea deals from Michael Cohen, David Pecker of American Media and Trump Organization accountant Allen Weisselberg.
“The Jews always flip,” was Trump’s comment on those deals, according to Wolff.
Former executive chairman of Breitbart News and Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who was quoted extensively in Fire and Fury, also provided Wolff with gossip for Siege: Trump Under Fire, according to the Guardian.
In his prologue to Fire and Fury, Wolff admitted: “Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are boldly untrue. These conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book.”
Indeed, “boldly untrue” assertions and “looseness with the truth” are hallmarks of Wolff’s writing style.
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