New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan may have obtained leaked audio from sensitive Situation Room meetings, including the moment of decision on whether to attack Iran, top White House officials tell Axios in a Sunday report.
Haberman and Swan directly quote Situation Room speakers in their forthcoming book “Regime Change,” which is about Trump’s second term and includes very recent events.
“Such a taped leak would be a shocking breach of one of the most secure settings on Earth,” write Jim BandeHei and Mike Allen in the double-bylined Axios piece. “Independent recording devices in the Situation Room are forbidden.”
Axios spoke to an unnamed Trump administration source, who told the outlet: “We’re afraid some of our most sensitive conversations were being recorded … And we have no idea which ones.”
When excerpts from “Regime Change” were released, administration officials noticed that “verbatim” dialogue from meetings regarding Iran and the Epstein files was in the copy. None of the reporting has been disputed by the participants, quoted or not.
“We hear President Trump is furious about the blow-by-blow accounts,” Axios wrote.
However, as Axios notes, Haberman and Swan may have taken the same bit of license that Bob Woodward pioneered in political journalism – by piecing together dialogue from sources’ memories. The “Regime Change” authors say they have conducted more than 1,000 interviews for their forthcoming book.
