White House Suspects NY Times Reporters Have Situation Room Recordings

Senior Trump administration officials are convinced that two New York Times reporters have somehow obtained recordings of White House Situation Room meetings, which would represent an astounding breach of security, Axios reported on Sunday. 

“We’re afraid some of our most sensitive conversations were being recorded,” a White House official told Axios. “And we have no idea which ones.” 

The two journalists are Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, and the officials are convinced that verbatim Situation Room conversations reproduced in their soon-to-be-released book must have come from recordings of deliberations inside what should be the most secure conference room in the world. The book — Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump — will be released on June 23rd, but excerpts already posted by the Times included detailed quotes from conversations that took place in the Situation Room. 

Some of those direct quotes first appeared in an April 7 Times article on the deliberations that took place in the run-up to Trump’s decision to team up with Israel in launching a major war on Iran. That report, also by Haberman and Swan, described how administration officials reacted to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s aggressive campaign to convince Trump to betray his campaign pledge to avoid regime-change wars.

Netanyahu was said to have assured Trump that Iran’s ballistic missile arsenal could be destroyed in just a few weeks, that Iran wouldn’t be able to stop traffic in the Strait of Hormuz, that Iran wasn’t likely to attack other countries in the region, that a huge protest movement could be sparked into seizing power, and that Kurdish fighters from Iraq might be enticed into attacking. 

Of course, like his infamous 2002 assurance that an invasion of Iraq would have “enormous positive reverberations on the region,” all of Netanyahu’s assurances about a war on Iran proved spectacularly wrong. At the time, according to Haberman and Swan’s reporting, some Trump administration officials were rightly skeptical. The day after Netanyahu’s presentation, CIA Director John Ratcliffe was said to have called Netanyahu’s pitch “farcical.” Secretary of State Marco Rubio was quoted as bluntly restating Ratcliffe’s characterization: “In other words, it’s bullshit.” 

When Trump asked Joint Chiefs Chairman General Dan Caine to weigh in, he’s quoted as saying, “Sir, this is, in my experience, standard operating procedure for the Israelis. They oversell, and their plans are not always well-developed. They know they need us, and that’s why they’re hard-selling.” 

Axios notes that the use of quotations doesn’t necessarily indicate an audio recording was obtained: “Bob Woodward pioneered contemporary historical political journalism by including dialogue in his books that was reconstructed from the memories of people in the rooms where things happened.” However, the fact that senior White House officials are concerned about what they’ve seen so far suggests that Haberman and Swan’s quotes may not be mere reconstructions. What’s more, the promotional descriptions of the book tout “unprecedented reporting from deep within the administration’s most closely guarded rooms.”