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“It goes through air, Bob… this is deadly stuff,” said the President as he knowingly allowed the contagion to spread unchecked across the nation.
“I’m just not going to leave,” said the President as the anti-government extremists he commanded began making plans to invade the Capitol on January 6th.
I’m going to tell the President, “it would be my recommendation you should resign,” Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy told Liz Cheney and the House Republican Leadership four days after the failed coup.
We found out these things and much more—months and years after the fact—because of books that were written (in the order quoted above) by: a) Bob Woodward; b) Maggie Haberman; and c) Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns.
It’s easy to criticize these journalists for sitting on facts that could have changed history if they had been reported in the daily publications—i.e. The Washington Post or The New York Times—that they work for.
But is that really fair?
Let’s start with Maggie Haberman, who was slammed on Twitter by Keith Olbermann and others for withholding information that could have, theoretically, stopped Trump’s bloody coup attempt before it happened.
As Steve Schmitt tweeted:
It has become standard practice to allow reporters to suppress vital public information to monetize later. This is as flagrant an abuse of the journalistic ethic of the Watergate era as anything Trump did to his oath.
And Schmitt’s problem with Haberman goes beyond the details of her reporting:
The decision to allow Haberman to cover Trump given her families financial entanglements with the Kushner’s and long professional relationship have always been an ethical travesty… Haberman doesn’t report on Trump so much as broker information between the institutions @nyt, Trump, @cnn for her benefit and their self interest, (biz model) not the readers/subscribers elucidation.
If you spent all your time on Twitter (like me), you, too, might have developed a negative view of “Trump Whisperer” Maggie Haberman over the past few years. (Case in point: The way she threw “Melania and Me” author Stephanie Winston Wolkoff under the bus to help sell Team Trump’s inauguration lies to NYT readers.)
But because I am fair and balanced, let’s hear both sides in the case of Twitter v. Haberman.
In an October 7 article in The Washington Post, Erik Wemple springs to Haberman’s defense, noting that she didn’t save everything for her book:
Some of Haberman’s scoops… were too pressing for a book-publishing schedule. In a February 2022 Times story with four bylines, Haberman reported that “staff in the White House residence periodically discovered wads of printed paper clogging a toilet — leading them to believe that Mr. Trump had attempted to flush documents.” This particular revelation, says Haberman, stemmed “a zillion percent” from her book reporting — not her Times beat work — so she got it into the newspaper long before the book was published. Yet the hordes still threw penalty flags for holding. A representative gripe on Twitter: “You should have reported on what you found out when you found out, instead of waiting to cash in on a book deal.”
Wemple notes that another scoop from the book (a pre-Jan. 6 warning from Pence Chief of Staff Marc Short) was published in the Times on June 3, 2022—“in advance of the Jan. 6 hearings on Capitol Hill”—because it was newsworthy.
Wemple also says that Haberman told him she got the “I’m just not going to leave,” quote “well after” the conclusion of Trump’s second impeachment trial, making it too late to influence the coup attempt or the vote to acquit.
How reporters explain themselves
In the case of Jonathan Martin and Alexander Burns, their book also had people such as Alex Shepard in The New Republic asking, “Should Reporters Save Scoops for Books?”
As Shepard puts it, reporters who get book deals are:
Incentivized to hold onto information that might otherwise have appeared in a newspaper or online sooner. At the same time, many of these same reporters are also paid by cable news networks as talking heads—meaning that they might be put in a position where they would be on our screens lying by omission, talking about a relevant political situation but holding back information that might be vital to it—information that they will then deploy at a later date, in order to drive book sales.
Shepard notes that:
We don’t know when Martin and Burns acquired audio of McCarthy saying Trump should resign. That is information that would have been highly relevant if they’d had it before the House voted to impeach Trump on January 13, 2021, for his actions leading up to the assault on the Capitol or perhaps even before the Senate voted to acquit him a month later. If they came by this knowledge after those dates, however, it’s not at all clear that publicly disseminating it would have made a substantial difference to anyone’s favored political outcome.
In at least one interview for their book that I saw, Martin and Burns did not rely on the, “we got the information too late to make a difference” excuse. Instead, they leaned in to the idea that their sources only gave them the best, juiciest scoops because they were writing a book, on the agreement they wouldn’t rush to publish it immediately.
Maybe that’s true. But it’s also an excuse that works conveniently for authors and profit-hungry publishers, while reinforcing the cozy, mutually back-scratching relationship between political journos and the powers they are supposed to be speaking truth to.
And then there’s Bob Woodward
On February 7, 2020, Donald Trump told Bob Woodward in a taped conversation that, even though no one in the U.S. has yet died from it, he already knew that the new coronavirus threatening America and the world was airborne and deadly—far more deadly than “even your strenuous flus.”
On February 10, three days after that call, Trump held a campaign rally in New Hampshire. From Feb 14-16, he golfed at Mar-a-Lago, held a fundraiser at Palm Beach, then he went to the Daytona 500. The 18th, he was at a fundraiser in Beverly Hills before heading to a Trump property in Las Vegas and a MAGA rally in Arizona. Then Colorado. Then Vegas again. Then India on the 24th and 25th.
On the 24th, Trump tweeted:
The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me!
On the 29th, he spoke at CPAC, where he rubbed himself against a flag.
All the while, Covid-19 was “seeding” in New York and California and numerous other states.
As Trump downplayed the risks publicly in the weeks and months ahead, the virus spread out of control (because airborne) and Bob Woodward stayed silent (because book).
By September, thanks to Trump’s negligence (and Woodward’s silence), America had 7 million confirmed infections and, with 200,000 already dead, a death rate 5X the global average.
Only then did Bob Woodward inform the rest of us what he and Trump had known all along.
During his September 2020 book tour, Woodward told Savannah Guthrie how shocked he was when he first learned on February 4, 2020 that Trump, “possessed the specific knowledge that could have saved lives.”
As of February 4, Woodward had that information, too.
If only he could have somehow gotten the information to somebody—some kind of “Deep Throat,” perhaps—brave enough to share it with the American people.
Instead, the truth stayed under wraps until Woodward racked up yet another #1 national bestseller. Meanwhile, America has now racked up 1.1 million Covid deaths and counting.
When traitors tell all
Setting the Woodward example aside, there are at least some clear arguments for why reporters withhold information for their books, based on when and how they get the information.
But what about people like John Bolton, Bill Barr, Chris Christie, Mark Esper, Stephanie Grisham and Mark Meadows—insiders who were in the room, who witnessed the crimes, who knew all the dangers Trump was putting us in? What excuses do they have, aside from cowardice, greed, and a desire to self-mythologize?
As Tom Nichols wrote for The Atlantic:
The fact is that these men and women remained silent for far too long once they were out of government service. They held back important things that the American people and their elected representatives needed to know. They kept them as their own personal secrets, either out of some misplaced sense of bureaucratic propriety, or because they had a book deal and didn’t want to steal their own thunder from release day.
They had a duty to speak up sooner. And they failed in that duty.
In The Washington Post in May 2022, Aaron Blake compared what four Trump insiders said, “during their tenures, when they left and when they decided to finally speak out,” noting that:
As each tell-all has emerged, it has been rightly noted that much of this information would have been relevant far earlier — say, when Trump was twice facing impeachment, or in the run-up to both Election Day 2020 and the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection.
Many of the tell-all writers make the case that they were the “grown-ups” in the room and they stayed in jobs out of a sense of patriotic duty—or a fear that their replacements would actually do all the insane, illegal things Trump told them to do.
But patriots don’t save information for a book. They act like Reality Winner and speak up when they believe they should.
These insiders knew who they were dealing with. Remember:
- Trump and his adult children were known criminals before he ever became the Republican nominee for President.
- As a candidate, Trump bragged about crimes he had committed and crimes he could still commit and get away with.
- In the 2016 campaign, he committed proven crimes to cheat his way to victory.
- As President, Trump committed numerous other crimes—including multiple instances of criminal obstruction to the Mueller investigation—and all the while, his aides and accomplices stayed silent.
- Mental health professionals warned us that Trump was a reckless, dangerous psychopath long before Covid-19 gave him the chance to prove it.
- When he knew he had lost the election, Trump planned a bloody coup to keep himself in power—and told people exactly what he was intending to do before he even did it.
- He abused his pardon power until his final moments in office to keep his criminal associates quiet.
- He’s still spreading The Big Lie and encouraging conspiracy theorists and extremists to keep up their chatter about a Second Civil War.
As Tom Nichols wrote:
I cannot imagine what it would be like to be burdened with knowing the president was mentally unstable, that he wanted to fire missiles at Mexico, that he was planning to exit NATO, that he wanted to shoot unarmed protesters, that he wanted to invalidate a national election…. I’m not sure what I’d have done.
But I’m reasonably certain I wouldn’t have kept it to myself until my agent told me I had a deal.
I understand why people get mad at reporters for not telling us every bit of information they find out the minute they found it out.
But what about the insiders who had all that information all along?
They’re the ones who allowed the crime spree to continue, the impeachments to end in acquitals, and The Big Lie to metastasize.
They’re the ones who’ve put personal gain above all else—and prioritized lucrative book deals over our increasingly frail democracy.
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