‘They’re liars!’ Michael Wolff blasts Trump for calling his book ‘fake’

‘They’re liars!’ Michael Wolff blasts Trump for calling his book ‘fake’

Despite numerous denials from the Trump administration that Wolff spoke with Trump, Wolff said he talked with him and was given access to senior staff members.

• Michael Wolff, author of the White House tell-all book that has drawn President Donald Trump’s ire, took to CNN to defend some of its accounts.
• Wolff said he talked with him and was given access by several senior staff members, despite the White House seeking to downplay his time in the White House in the early days of the administration.

Michael Wolff, author of “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” defended his book’s account of the purported chaos inside President Donald Trump’s administration during an CNN interview Monday.

The book, which paints a frantic scene of the White House through its embarrassing quotes from senior staff members, was released Friday. Over the past week, it has drawn the Trump administration’s ire and outright denials of some of its stunning details.

“Everybody was told to speak to me,” Wolff said of his largely unfettered access to members of Trump’s staff.

Steve Bannon “told people to cooperate, Sean Spicer told people to cooperate, Kellyanne Conway told people to cooperate,” he said, referring to the former White House chief strategist, the former White House press secretary, and the current White House counselor.

Trump, who has called Wolff’s book “phony” and gone on a campaign to discredit it, has said he “authorized Zero access to White House” and had “actually turned him down many times.” Trump’s personal attorney threatened to take “imminent” legal action over the book, although it appears the threat may have backfired.

CNN host Don Lemon asked Wolff why the Trump administration was “saying that it’s fake.”

“Because they’re liars!” Wolff said. “What are you talking about? This is Donald Trump. This is what he does.”

“Day after day after day after day … he doesn’t tell the truth because he doesn’t know what the truth is,” Wolff continued. “Because he doesn’t care what the truth is, because his reality is different from everybody else’s reality.”

Although Wolff said he stood by “absolutely everything” in his book, he acknowledged in an author’s note that he was not sure if all of the claims were true, given that some of the subjects he interviewed gave conflicting accounts.

The book’s release has been met with some skepticism, with some prominent journalists calling it “light in fact-checking.” But that hasn’t stopped readers from heading out to bookstores in droves, and the book’s release drew huge crowds in certain pockets of the country.

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