Breaking and Developing — Story 1: Rupert Murdoch and Michael Wolff Push President Trump’s Buttons and Trump Reacts As Predicted By Attacking Steven Bannon — White House of Con Games or Junk Journalism or Progressive Propaganda or Tabloid Trash? — Updated — Wolff Taped His Conversations With White House Employees — Trump Tries To Stop Publication of Book with Cease and Desist Letter Making Fire and Fury An Instant Best Seller! — Available Friday at 9 A.M. — Videos — Updated January 4 and 5, 2018

Michael Wolff, the author of “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House.” AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster

• “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House” has set the political world ablaze.
• It contains vivid, detailed, and embarrassing accounts of President Donald Trump and those around him.
• But the book’s author, Michael Wolff, says he can’t be sure that all of it is true.

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The author of the explosive new book about Donald Trump’s presidency acknowledged in an author’s note that he wasn’t certain all of its content was true.

Michael Wolff, the author of “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” included a note at the start that casts significant doubt on the reliability of the specifics contained in the rest of its pages.

Several of his sources, he says, were definitely lying to him, while some offered accounts that flatly contradicted those of others.

But some were nonetheless included in the vivid account of the West Wing’s workings, in a process Wolff describes as “allowing the reader to judge” whether the sources’ claims are true.

Donald Trump, seen at a meeting in the White House the day after elements of Wolff’s book began to be reported. AP

In other cases, the media columnist said, he did use his journalistic judgment and research to arrive at what he describes “a version of events I believe to be true.”

Here is the relevant part of the note, from the 10th page of the book’s prologue:

“Many of the accounts of what has happened in the Trump White House are in conflict with one another; many, in Trumpian fashion, are baldly untrue. These conflicts, and that looseness with the truth, if not with reality itself, are an elemental thread of the book.

“Sometimes I have let the players offer their versions, in turn allowing the reader to judge them. In other instances I have, through a consistency in the accounts and through sources I have come to trust, settled on a version of events I believe to be true.”

The book itself, reviewed by Business Insider from a copy acquired prior to its Friday publication, is not always clear about what level of confidence the author has in any particular assertion.

Lengthy, private conversations are reported verbatim, as are difficult-to-ascertain details like what somebody was thinking or how the person felt.

Wolff attributes his book to “more than two hundred interviews” with people including Trump and “most members of his senior staff.” According to the news website Axios, Wolff has dozens of hours of tapes to back up what he said.

Claims contained in the book have been widely reported by the media in the US and further afield.

They include assertions that Trump never wanted to be president, that all of his senior staff considered him an idiot, that he tried to lock the Secret Service out of his room, and that he ate at McDonald’s to avoid being poisoned.

Business Insider rounded up some more of the most eye-catching claims in this article.

Trump, who sought to block publication of the book but was too late, tweeted Thursday that it was “full of lies, misrepresentations and sources that don’t exist.”

Donald J. Trump

✔@realDonaldTrump

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!

9:52 PM – Jan 4, 2018

•  39,83139,831 Replies

•  19,88819,888 Retweets

•  79,80679,806 likes

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The White House press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, described the book as “complete fantasy.”

Asked to rebut specific points, she said: “I’m not going to waste my time or the country’s time going page by page and talking about a book that is complete fantasy and just full of tabloid gossip.”

Other people mentioned in the book have also disputed claims made about them.

Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who the book said warned Trump that he may be under surveillance from British spies, issued a statement describing the claim as “categorically absurd” and “simply untrue.”

Anna Wintour, the longtime Vogue editor, also dismissed the claim that she lobbied Trump to be his ambassador to the UK as “laughably preposterous.”

Other journalists have also urged caution. Some cited Wolff’s track record — questions were raised about his 2008 book on Rupert Murdoch — and others compared his claims with their own knowledge of the Trump White House.

On Friday morning, Wolff responded to claims about the accuracy of his book in an interivew with NBC’s “Today” show.

Host Savannah Guthrie asked him: “You stand by everything in the book? Nothing made up?”

He responded: “Absolutely everything in the book.”

Shortly after, he expanded, saying: “I am certainly and absolutely, in every way, comfortable with everything I’ve reported in this book.”

This isn’t necessarily at odds with what he said in the author’s note, as it allows for the possibility that he was told something untrue and repeated it without realising, or reached a wrong conclusion when presenting a version of contested events.

http://www.businessinsider.com/michael-wolff-note-says-he-doesnt-know-if-trump-book-is-all-true-2018-1

Queen Hillary Is Just Another Corrupt Lying Bought and Paid For Phony Politician — Clinton Cash Bribe Laundering — Democratic Party Can Do A Lot Better — Run Jerry Run — Videos

The New York Times reported Sunday evening that a forthcoming investigative bombshell book on Hillary and Bill Clinton will soon be the focus of major feature stories and is regarded as “the most anticipated and feared book of a presidential cycle.”

For weeks, news outlets from the Washington Post to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer have alluded that the highly-anticipated May 5 release of Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich by three-time New York Times bestselling investigative journalist Peter Schweizer could be a presidential game-changer. Schweizer is President of the non-partisan Government Accountability Institute (GAI) and a Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News.  

The New York Times revealed that Clinton Cash describes how the Clintons’ income from 2001 to 2012 was at least $136.5 million, how Mr. Clinton would routinely fetch half-a-million dollar honorariums for speeches while Mrs. Clinton was Secretary of State, and much more.

Despite the Clinton campaign’s ability to dismiss “critical books as conservative propaganda,” the Times says “Clinton Cash is potentially more unsettling, both because of its focused reporting and because major news organizations are expected to pursue the story lines found in the book.”

The Times adds, “Members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee have been briefed about the book’s findings.”

Publishing giant HarperCollins said in a press release that the book represents the culmination of a one-year deep dive investigation by Schweizer’s GAI investigative unit. The GAI, which has quickly established itself as one of the nation’s most respected—and feared—Washington watchdog organizations, has gained notoriety for vigorously investigating both Republicans and Democrats, as well as releasing its investigative findings through major national mainstream media partners, such as CBS News’ 60 Minutes, New York Times, Politico, ABC News, and Fox News. 

Indeed, GAI and Schweizer have already left their investigative mark on Capitol Hill. Schweizer, whom Newsweek dubbed “The Wonk Who Slays Washington,” was responsible for the ouster of former Republican Rep. Spencer Bachus (R-AL), then-chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, after his book, Throw Them All Out, exposed insider trading by members of Congress. 

The driving force behind the only significant bipartisan reform legislation to pass during the Obama presidency—the STOCK (Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge) Act—Schweizer is, as David Weigel (then of Slate) put it, the “author of the book that started the STOCK Act stampede.” Schweizer partnered with veteran CBS News 60 Minutes reporter Steve Kroft for an insider trading report based on the book that resulted in CBS winning the coveted Joan Shorenstein Barone Award for excellence in Washington-based reporting on congressional political affairs. 

Former Rep. Rob Andrews (D-NJ) also knows the sting of a Schweizer book investigation. In October 2013, Schweizer once again partnered with CBS 60 Minutesand Steve Kroft to report the revelations of his book, Extortion, which exposed how Republicans and Democrats use leadership PAC “slush funds” to bankroll lavish lifestyles. The Sunday before the book’s release, CBS 60 Minutes did a story titled “Washington’s Open Secret” based on Schweizer’s book revelations that led to Andrews’ resignation from Congress.

Whether Schweizer’s soon-to-be-released book will spell the same political fate for Hillary Rodham Clinton’s presidential aspirations remains to be seen. The Washington Post has already done two major stories based off the Clinton Cash press release’s revelation that Hillary’s brother, Tony Rodham, sat on the board of a mining company that in 2012 received one of only two “gold exploitation permits” from the Haitian government—a coveted concession that was the first of its kind issued in over 50 years. 

Now, with major media all preparing feature reports on Clinton Cash’s myriad revelations, Hillary Clinton’s defenders are already in damage control mode. “The newly assembled Clinton campaign team is planning a full-court press to diminish the book as yet another conservative hit job,” reports the Times. 

That will be difficult, however, says the New York Times, because “Mr. Schweizer writes mainly in the voice of a neutral journalist and meticulously documents his sources, including tax records and government documents, while leaving little doubt about his view of the Clintons.”

http://www.breitbart.com/big-journalism/2015/04/19/new-york-times-clinton-cash-most-anticipated-and-feared-book-of-a-presidential-cycle/