Trump aides are freaking out that recordings of Situation Room meetings about the Epstein files made their way to New York Times reporters. Rep. Ro Khanna joined Chris Hayes to discuss the Axios report, which claims that Donald Trump "is furious about the blow-by-blow accounts."
Senior White House officials suspect that Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan got their hands on audio recordings from Situation Room meetings for their upcoming book, Regime Change — a potential breach that has the administration rattled, according to Axios.
Recording devices are strictly prohibited in the Sit Room, making this, if true, an extraordinary security violation.
"We're afraid some of our most sensitive conversations were being recorded," one administration source said. "And we have no idea which ones."
The suspicion stems from the almost verbatim dialogue that appeared in early excerpts covering the Iran war and the Epstein files, published ahead of the book's June 23 release. The authors drew on more than 1,000 interviews for the project, which chronicles Trump's second term.
Notably, the White House hasn't pushed back on the accuracy of the quoted exchanges — including one in which Secretary of State Marco Rubio, reacting to Netanyahu's regime-change proposals for Iran, called them "bullshit." Trump, by all accounts, is not pleased.
As Axios's Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen note, Haberman and Swan are working in a well-established tradition. Woodward built his entire legacy on reconstructed dialogue sourced from people who witnessed events firsthand.
As Ro Khanna said on Hayes's show, "these survivors are seeing these people not be investigated, not be prosecuted." And the freakout from Team Trump will only drum up book sales.
